She's a few miles up, tumbling through the air over proud young mountain range, snowy at the peaks, blanketed in forests lower down, and dotted with lakes and... what even is that, actually. Some kind of structure, clearly, from the artificial colors and regular shapes, but it's huge, built partly into the mountain but extending at least a quarter mile from it.

The nearest lake is in the next valley over, if she wants to aim for that, or there's a river running under the structure - it's not very wide or deep, though. Or plowing into the mountainside at speed is always an option.

When Weeping Cherry planned her experiment, plowing into a mountainside was not actually one of her expected outcomes.

She pushes the forb's diagnostic windows aside and scans the landscape. She grabs onto as much air as she can, which proves to not be much at all. She fires it in brief jets to control her tumbling, and then in one large jet as hard as she can manage to slow her descent.

When that proves insufficient to overcome gravity, she decides that the lake does look like a better prospect, and angles herself that way.

There are a few people on the shore of the lake, fishing or walking along the shore or just enjoying the scenery, and a few more people out on the lake in boats or on rafts; they mostly look mundanely human, though one has royal blue hair and a few appear to be addressing members of the local crow population. The boats and rafts are made from some clearly-artificial material, perhaps plastic, in a variety of colors and patterns, no two alike or even particularly similar.

It is, fortunately, not too hard to find a big patch of lake without anyone boating on it. The water is clear and cold and her splashdown startles a school of fish, who mostly manage to swim away unharmed.

She is not buoyant, but water is much denser than air, so she has no particular trouble moving enough water to stay on the surface.

She quickly checks through her forb's diagnostic messages for anything relevant and, finding nothing, scans the local radio and neutrino broadcasts, just in case something dramatic happened to all the forbs and there's a coordinated emergency response.

Her current best guess is 'alternate world'. She could just sink to the bottom of the lake and let her forb repair itself, but it will repair itself just as well if she goes exploring, and if she were the kind of person not to take the occasional risk, she wouldn't even be here.

She uses jets of water to skim across the top of the lake towards the nearest boat.

The nearest boat - gold-flecked burnt umber with midnight blue trim - is making pretty good time towards her, itself, though it slows when she starts jetting towards it. The person aboard the boat has a long-handled net (burnt umber handle, blue rim, gold net) to try to fish her out with, if she gets close enough for that.

Sure, she'll let herself be fished. If she needs to escape she can jump back into the water.

"Hello!" she says. "I'm Weeping Cherry. I was in an accident and I'm not sure what happened. Could you tell me where we are?"

The woman with the net looks very confused at Weeping Cherry speaking to her, and doesn't reply, but pulls her in closer - it seems like the net is actually retracting toward her, the handle getting shorter, though there's no visible mechanism for that.

With the net retracted to arm's length, she flips the handle over to more fully enclose the forb, and gets out a lump of - clay? moldable plastic? - and a two-inch-tall miniature lidded bucket, both in the same burnt umber color as everything else; with a moment's concentration, the lump takes on the shape of the bucket, but larger, and she carefully deposits the forb inside.

"What?" she says to herself. That pretty much confirms she's in an alternate world. You could do the same thing with a fixity device, but she didn't sense any fixity fields at all.

It looked as though the person could just make buckets, so Cherry doesn't feel bad about disassembling the side and climbing out.

... about trying to disassemble the bucket. It does not appear to be made of atoms.

"Really! Why was I expecting the magic bucket to be made of atoms," she complains to herself. Experimentally, she tries grabbing the side and shaking it. If that works roughly as expected, she tries using the sonic return to figure out how heavy it is.

It does work as expected! The bucket is slightly more dense than plastic, with a diameter about three times the length of her forb, so it's not very heavy, just a couple of pounds in weight.

Perfect! It is light enough to move, which means that she can still jump.

"Hey! Let me out!" she calls. As she does so, she aligns herself against one wall and throws herself into the lid of the bucket hard enough to make it jump a few feet into the air.

"If you don't let me out, I'm going to launch myself into the lake," she warns.

She can hear startled caws from outside the bucket!

Also, the thump of something heavy being put on top of it.

You know, she should have seen that one coming. It feels like she's been a bit wrong-footed this whole time. She thinks for a moment.

She briefly considers whether the bucket is thin enough that she could press herself against one side and use the air to do anything, but she's not sure what she would actually do with the air.

And she's on a boat, so she doesn't really want to play with temperature in a way that will get the boat stuck in ice or cause a fire.

It's possible that the person who enbucketed her is deaf, but it's also possible that they just don't speak English and didn't recognize her as something intelligent. Or they don't care whether she's intelligent, and would have enbucketed her anyway.

In the end, she's not in a rush. Her forb has plenty of room to repair itself, and once it does she can just construct a body outside the bucket. She clings to the roof of the bucket so that she can escape once it's opened, and makes loud wordless keening wailing sounds that should hopefully communicate distress even across a language barrier.

After a few seconds of the keening sound, the bucket stops vibrating along with it; it's been soundproofed.

The boat speeds along, taking only a few minutes to reach the shore, and then its captain deploys its legs to walk onto the beach. The crows have by this point confirmed that the forb wasn't dropped by anyone flying overhead - there are a few people up there, and even one with yellow as part of their signature color scheme, but he doesn't have any crystals like that and hasn't dropped anything today. With this established, the woman carries the bucket out of her boat and sets it on the sand before using a long stick to open it.

Weeping Cherry is a bit annoyed at being soundproofed. On the one hand, totally fair, she was deliberately making distressing noises. On the other hand, they could have just let her out!

When the bucket opens, she leaps out fast enough to hopefully be hard to catch, but gently enough to not do more than bruise someone standing in front of her.

When she lands on the sand, she'll grab some and use it to scoot out of reach of any arms or nets. If anyone tries to surround her, she'll spit sand at them.

There are a bunch of crows around the bucket, who quickly take to the air when she jumps out, but only the one humanoid, who's standing well back and doesn't try to catch her again. Half a dozen of the crows follow her, and two of those seem very legibly curious, well beyond what she'd expect to be able to pick up from their body language.

That's very strange. Is this ... a psychic crow hivemind?

She peers around at the other nearby humanoids, keeping an eye on whether they're getting closer. The crows are less threatening, although maybe they can also make spontaneous buckets. She flashes the first dozen prime numbers at the crows, in case that prompts a response.

The other humanoids are watching, but not approaching at all, and the nearest few seem braced to run, aside from one who's sitting in some sort of legged bubble that wasn't there when she was falling.

The legible crows seem excited when she starts flashing at them, and one is very clearly wondering what she is and who made her and for what.

Okay! She was totally guessing about the psychic crow hivemind, but apparently this is her life now.

She tries thinking hard in the crows' direction, in case that helps, although she hopes that it doesn't because that would be really creepy.

They seem to like the flashing, and she's noticing a lot of brightly colored designs, which makes sense if the crows are in charge. She tries putting her selftree's coat of arms on her exterior. It's a bright green fractal leaf pattern over a light blue Cartesian grid on a black background.

They don't appear to be able to hear her, but both of the crows are excited about the coat of arms! One of them breaks off from the group to go ask the humanoids whose design that is.

After a moment, one of the other crows becomes legible, wondering if she can understand them.

Weeping Cherry thinks for a moment about how to reply. At least visual communication is working.

She clears the coat of arms, and shows a picture of the crow and herself instead. She draws little orbs of leaving the crow's head and reaching her, and then some differently colored orbs leaving her, but vanishing before they can reach the crow.

This is very startling! They've never heard of a rock that was a thinking creature before! There's a lot of excited cawing about it and another of the crows leaves to go tell everyone.

Oh good! That's the important thing to communicate. Now that they know she's a thinking creature, presumably they will be less likely to imprison her and she can ask more questions.

She shows a picture of her lab (a clean, brightly lit, wood-paneled room full of strange machines), followed by a swirling explosion of color, followed by her falling and ending up in the lake.

The crows have no idea what that's all about.

Valid! She doesn't have much idea what happened either.

She thinks for a moment. Without the crows bringing up topics, it seems harder to make drawings that come across unambiguously. The primary things she's interested in knowing are where she is and what the crows and humanoids can do. The latter seems hard to ask about.

She tries putting a picture of her next to her coat of arms, and then a picture of the crows next to a blank space with a question mark next to it.