She appears to be in a roughly-cut stone tunnel, partly natural but clearly enlarged with the use of tools. It's dark. In one direction it is darker and there are unsettling noises; in the other direction, it is less dark and more quiet.

This is her hazmat armature, of course it has some nice features even if she can't requisition many parts. A navigation light, for example. And rudimentary SONAR. What do the unsettling noises resemble?

The unsettling noises resemble spiders, but louder! Much louder. Way too loud.

Ah-huh.

Let's put the power wrench away and take out... Arc welder on one arm and nailgun on the other. And quick-march in the opposite direction.

In the opposite direction there are fewer spider noises! In fact after a few minutes there are no spider noises at all!

There are a few miscellaneous sounds - lizards skittering, small mammals squeaking - but she seems to be frightening the wildlife away with the sound of her approach.

The source of the increased ambient light in this direction turns out to be veins of glowing blue rock running through the walls of the tunnel at unpredictable intervals.

After she's been going this way for a few minutes, she may begin to notice a horrible smell wafting toward her from up ahead. There are undertones of rust and rot, death and decay and blood, but the main component of the smell is something completely unfamiliar.

There isn't really a way around her hazmat armature making a lot of noise. She's definitely not going to go without it. She can shift into low gear, at least. Saves fuel if nothing else.

...Okay she wants samples of this blue stuff since it doesn't look obviously alive. She picks bits of it out with a claw-like tool and subjects it to various instruments, crushing, water, electrical voltage, and so on.

(She doesn't notice any of the smells. Hazmat suit = isolation)

The blue stuff glows, and glows brighter when crushed or zapped. It's fairly soft as rocks go, and an unusually good conductor. Crushed to powder, it dissolves in water fairly readily, yielding glowing blue water.

If she has no way of noticing the smell, then she's going to be really surprised when five short humanlike creatures with swords and axes spring out of a side tunnel and attack her.

She has enough time to drop the piece of glowing blue rock one arm was holding in surprise and start to turn towards them before-

An axe clangs off her hazmat armature, and then a sword half a second later. They don't seem to like her navigation light, though; they squint and turn their heads away from the brightness.

She doesn't think to turn the floodlights instead of just the navigation light on yet because she's not thinking she is panicking and screaming inside the suit. Sword-holding monster gets a voltmeter and more importantly the hundred pound arm behind it down on its shoulder with crushing force. She would have fallen over, backpedaling, if the suit weren't designed with a gyro and limiters to prevent just that.

Sword-holding monster is not happy about this! Sword-holding monster is now on the tunnel floor and screaming. Its friends trample it on their way to attempt to hack the hazmat armature apart.

And arm goes limp- and arm back up- why is the pressure so low she's still in low gear. She takes two seconds to fix this and as the engine roars she finally notices the light aversion and thumbs the floodlights on.

The suit's developing some pretty alarming dents, but now she can properly aim for the head of the second disgusting thing with a swing of the grabber-arm...

In the sudden blaze of light, they scream and fling their arms up to shield their eyes. Crunch goes the second monster. She can probably get the rest while they're all flailing and hiding their faces, if she's quick.

It's debatable if hazmat armatures can be described as quick. Maybe the combat-designed ones piloted by a combat-tested soldier could do it but she's still kinda screaming and has never actually been in a fight before. She hesitates a bit, then sends one flying into a wall headfirst, but there's easily enough time for one of the things to recover from the glare and put a sharp thing into her slightly softer back while she's swinging to dispatch Mr. Crushed Shoulder before he gets back up.

That's three monsters down, one still cowering in the light, and one swinging its axe at the back of the hazmat armature.

She starts to move on the one she can see but when the axe hits she swears loudly - turn off breach alarm I know I'm in danger - turns around with one arm stuck with its elbow bent thank you cut tubes and - okay there's still one behind me they're humanoid so hopefully not that fast - she charges at it, tackles and physically carries it, squeezing the neck with the still-good grabber arm. She keeps running a bit after it dies before turning around to face the last remaining hideous Darwinist monster.

Oh, god, she can smell it now.

The smell is really unpleasant!

The remaining hideous Darwinist monster runs at her yelling and waving its sword.

It is no match for a hydraulically driven gore-covered grabber arm.

But then she has to open the canopy and lean forward so she doesn't fill the cockpit when she inevitably throws up from the combination of disgust, shock, and adrenaline crash.

The dead monsters have no commentary on this turn of events. They're just going to sit there leaking foul black blood and smelling really bad.

Okay. Okay. Wherever she is she obviously really needs her hazmat suit so she shuts off the engine, slowly climbs out and investigates the damage.

She has spare tubing and crimping, so that's probably fixable, but she doesn't have an easy way to refill the half liter or so of slick blue hydraulic fluid now making bits of cave floor alarmingly slippery. She'll tune the valves down a little and keep it in mind...

She keeps glancing both ways down the tunnel and listening carefully while she replaces the sliced-open tubes.

No further monsters show up in the next few minutes, although there are some unsettling spider noises.

Oh you can just bet she's doing this as fast as is safe. A few minutes is more than enough to get that arm unstuck, stitch the thick rubber skin back together and spray a whole lot of foul-smelling sealant on it, and declare the voltmeter a lost cause and discard it.

She climbs back in and grabs the sturdiest looking weapon - the rusty sword - and heads in the same direction as before. Being more careful and watchful this time. Jumping at shadows.

The shadows are fairly nonviolent. One time she startles a family of dog-sized lizards with horrible worm faces, and they all flee into a crack in the tunnel wall.

The tunnel seems to be leading her in a generally downward direction. Now and then there are more blue rocks in the walls.

She takes some more and stuffs it into a big sealable sample jar. Now she has a lantern if her electricals die.

And down is not a particularly good direction but she doesn't have a map so she'll keep to one path where she can backtrack by the faint scratches in the stone her suit's feet are leaving if she needs to.

Down, and down, and down. Her path is somewhat constrained by the size of the hazmat armature; most side tunnels she sees aren't wide enough to fit her.

But eventually, she finds signs of civilization. An underground ravine spanned by a massive stone bridge, with a set of gates on the other side so large that at first they look like a huge iron wall. The place seems deserted from out here, and possibly like it's been deserted for decades or centuries... except there are a bunch of dead monsters lying around.

It's not that big... But yeah it's definitely not fitting anywhere she might have to squeeze or duck.

Hm. Let's sit back here and ping it with sonar for a while. Infrared lens, too. Anything moving? Anything warm?

There are no warm or moving things detectable on the bridge or near the gate.

So she sets across at a steady pace, pretty unnerved at how loudly her engine is echoing down here. Kind of unnerved by the steadily dropping fuel meter, too.

There are more dead monsters in the area in front of the gate, including several different types - the small kind that seems most numerous, another more human-sized kind, and a kind that's twelve feet tall and has great big horns. There are two of those. All of the dead monsters seem to have been killed in battle.

If she looks for a gate-opening mechanism, there isn't any such thing obvious on an initial inspection, but there is a crudely-cut tunnel off to one side that bypasses the gate completely, and it's more than roomy enough for her to pass through in her armature.

Lacking a better path, through that she goes.

The tunnel ends in a huge stone room with a bunch of smaller stone rooms adjoining it. Directly ahead, part of another stone bridge juts out over an enormous chasm. It looks like there used to be two bridges crossing the chasm and meeting in the middle, and large sections of this one have fallen away or been demolished, but its counterpart is still standing. The architecture is frankly awe-inspiring.

There are dead monsters everywhere, and nothing seems to be moving or making noise.

Whooo. She turns on the floodlights to get a better view of all this. It's some impressive building, that's for sure.

It's stunning. Everything is built on a grand scale - although the elaborate stone coffins lining the walls are oddly small...

The place seems deserted, but there are dead monsters on the remaining bridge, so it's a good bet that there's some way to get there from here. Would she like to go exploring?

She would like to have some good rope in case of falls. Spare tubing and electrical cables don't count. It'd take a lot of rope to hold an armature, but still.

She marks the entrance she came in with by stomping a few times, scuffing the stone in a particular way, then tries to find the way forward.

Beautiful stone corridors with dead monsters scattered across the floor. Crude tunnels routing around collapsed sections. Elaborately carved stone pillars. Empty sarcophagi, some upturned or tipped out of their alcoves. More dead monsters.

And now she's on the bridge! The view from here is if anything even more amazing.

She might as well look at some of the dead monsters' weapons, maybe take whatever one of the big ones was using. The armature's probably strong enough to swing it.

She pauses and shuts off the engine a little ways along the bridge, taking it all in for as long as the battery lasts before resuming her course. No camera - you can't attach everything to an armature.

There's a very hefty battle-axe available.

On the other side of the bridge, there's a lovely spacious stone room full of dead monsters, then another crudely cut tunnel. One fork of the tunnel leads to a worm-lizard warren; the lizards turn their horrible worm faces in her direction and hiss threateningly, but they don't attack.

Ugh, more hideous guard dogs... Guard lizards. She leaves them alone, too.

The other fork of the tunnel leads to a room with dried blood all over the walls and floor. Red blood, not the noxious black goo bled by the monsters. The archway a few feet to her right opens onto a cavernous expanse - she's back in the place with the crossed bridges, on the opposite end from where she started. This end of the broken bridge definitely looks like it was deliberately smashed. There are a couple more dead monsters lying around.

A set of elaborate double doors stands ajar, facing the end of the broken bridge across the beautifully carved floor. From beyond those doors, a faint noise - it sounds like people talking.

Okay.

They have definitely already heard her, so no point sneaking up, but...

She turns the engine off and listens to identify French, English, Russian, Italian...?

Of those options, it sounds closest to English, but there are no individually recognizable words.

The doors swing open. A short man in badly stained armour walks through them. Behind him, an eight-foot-tall humanoid statue with glowing eyes lets go of the doors and steps quietly in his wake.

The man smiles at Walta and says something in his not-quite-English language. Going just by the tone, it seems like it's probably a friendly greeting.

She starts the engine back up, low gear, quiet enough to talk over.

"-Hello. I cannot understand you." Repeat in German, English, Hungarian, why not all three.

He seems to get that she's trying multiple languages, because he listens to each one and then shakes his head and shrugs to indicate noncomprehension.

Having established that they have no languages in common, he points to himself and says "Stalas", points to his large stone companion and says "Kador", points to her...?

"Gerwalta. Walta. I am Walta, you are Stalas, he is Kador. I am not Stalas." Point point point.

She gestures over the suit that turns her into a bulky six and a bit foot height. "I am wearing armature. Kador is wearing armature?"

"Kador is not wearing armature," says Stalas, shaking his head.

"Is Kador... Um. Kador, are you..." How does she depict "Darwinist"?

She makes chittery spider noises, and then imitates the lizard screech as best she can. "Like that?"

(The big axe is not getting set down soon, even if it's drawing pressure off.)

Stalas looks puzzled. Kador also looks puzzled. They shake their heads confusedly.

"Kador is golem," says Stalas, with a word from his own language. "Is..."

He points at the floor. "Is stone." At the head of Walta's axe. "Is metal." At a nearby pillar. "Is stone." At various parts of his armour. "Is metal." At Kador. "Is stone - is person." At himself. "Is person." At Walta. "Is person. Golem is stone person, is metal person."

No she has got to be misunderstanding something here. 

Last she heard that kind of thing was decades away at best. Unless there's a meaty core in there.

...She gives the German words back and makes a groaning screaming sound and waves the axe and asks, "Monsters, are not person?"

"Monsters are not person," Stalas agrees. He points at a monster corpse, to clarify - "is monsters?"

"That is monster. That is one kind of monster." Spider noise, "Is two kind of monster."

She sags in relief. "I'm not a killer."

Stalas nods. "Monster is not person."

Nodnod. "Monster is-" fake wretching. She shakes her head. "Disgusting."

She mutters, "This way of talking is going to get old fast... At least they're not attacking."

Nod nod.

With some gestures and a few clever extensions of their limited vocabulary, Stalas manages to convey that if Walta wants to come in and meet his and Kador's friends, she can do that. There are four more people and they are all golems.

She looks at them kind of doubtfully. She looks back out into the bridge.

Aw, to hell with it. She follows them inside, parks the armature in a reasonably out of the way spot, turns it off and locks it up and clambers out, trying to avoid the blood still stuck to part of the armored front and rubbery back.

"Hello everyone."

It's something of a walk from the bridge area to the place where Stalas and Kador's friends may be found; Stalas fills the time with language exchange.

There are four stone golems including Kador, and one ten-foot-tall metal golem that looks like some ancient exotic suit of armour moving around on its own. The glow of their eyes is the same colour as the glowing blue rocks.

"Hello!" says one of the non-Kador stone golems, waving. Stalas points at that one. "Hesta," he says, and the other two stone golems are "Tamek, Pell," and the huge metal one is "Caridin".

"Hello," says Caridin. His voice is deep and hollow, with metallic undertones.

Stalas starts cheerfully giving everyone a vocabulary lesson in the German he's been picking up from Walta. A little ways into that, Caridin asks him a question and he turns to Walta and translates, "Caridin says, what is armature?"

"Armature is metal - um. Better idea." 

She steps around to the side and undoes one of the big screws holding the engine cover up. Some rubber hiding valves and tubing peels away too.

"That is fire. This is engine. Engine is small fire. Gas-" She takes deep breaths. "I am breathing gas. I can not breathe" (point) "water. Gas is small and cold," (shiver) "Then gas is hot and big. Engine moves when gas goes small to big." And she continues in this vein.

Stalas is fascinated and happily translates and explains for Caridin, who comes back with questions about how various parts of this arrangement work. It's fairly clear that Caridin has some sort of an engineering background, but also abundantly clear that he's never seen an engine like this before.

Oh, wow, this is actually a lot of fun, explaining to an eager audience. And earning her goodwill so they probably won't threaten her or anything as easily.

The language barrier is still problematic, but she tries to subtly figure out their tech level. She could use replacements for this dented armor and this bent control linkage in the right arm, for example.

Caridin, it transpires, is a smith. He has Stalas convey an offer to fix the dented armour. The control linkage seems to puzzle him more, but he's willing to try to work something out.

It doesn't need to be the exact shape, it can be bulkier - but it does need this hole here to be precise-ish, and this exact length, and it ought to be reasonably stiff. She shows him the power wrench, drill, welder, and pneumatic hammer attachments currently attached to the armature's back and tries to indicate how it's designed to build things in dangerous environments. Maybe she can help?

Caridin is happy to work with her. Fixing the armour is fairly trivial; fixing the control linkage is an interesting puzzle. Here's how he'd go about it. Her drill might come in handy; he does not have a comparably convenient tool for making holes in things.

The drill is not exactly a precision instrument. And she'll run out of fuel soon so they can't use her tools for everything. But she is fascinated to observe a smith at work.

Here's the armour, and here's the control linkage, and now Caridin would like to talk about possible alternate fuel sources!

This is a diesel engine, it's harder to maintain but can accept a wider variety of fuel. It needs to be a liquid that burns relatively smoothly at high heat but doesn't outright deflagrate. Rendered animal fat has potential but it will probably hurt the engine long term.

Stalas contributes the suggestion that maybe someone in Orzammar will know of a fuel with those properties invented sometime in the last thousand years. Because that's how long Caridin has been down here in this otherwise-abandoned tunnel complex.

"Ten of ten of ten? You can't live that long."

"Golems live until killed," says Stalas.

She kind of doubts that but "...Orzammar? Is that part of Africa?"

"No," says Stalas. He finds a bit of scrap metal and scratches a quick map into the cave floor, depicting a continent with a totally unrecognizable silhouette. Here's a country called Orlais, there's a country called Ferelden, there in between them are the Something-or-other Mountains, and Orzammar is apparently located in the northern half of that mountain range.

This... Could be Asia... Right?

She really hopes it's Asia somehow.

"I'm really lost."

He offers her the makeshift drawing utensil.

She sketches mainland Europe and Britain with confidence and the Nordic areas and balkans hesitantly, trailing off to a huge mass in the west, and the Mediterranean sea. The rest of the world gets a very rough sketch and an arrow pointing Europe to its smaller version.

Stalas peers at this map. He frowns and shakes his head. He goes back to his own map and fills in some more edges, names some more locations, and then sketches a vague blob nearby and encloses the known continent and the vague continent in a firm circle together. That's the world, as far as he knows.

"...Guess our teleport machine worked! HA! HA! Oh god."

Stalas looks sympathetic.

"I don't even know why I'm crying. I was- I was basically a slave. Make me work, no pay, can't leave, I'm in shock or something do you have water?"

They have water. Stalas fetches water.

She drinks it. Quite a bit.

And tops up the armature's radiator tank.

"I can't be down here alone. I can stay? I like Caridin."

"We don't stay," says Stalas. "We go to Orzammar. You can go with."

"Yes, I want to go with. Hm, how far? To see if I need fuel or not."

"Far. Twenty days maybe. If not enough fuel, we can carry the armature."

"Not enough fuel. One tank, six to ten hours. The blue light rock, does it power things?"

"Lyrium," says Stalas. "Yes. Lyrium powers things."

"I have some, from the cave. Talk about Lyrium? Maybe a fuel?"

"Maybe," he says thoughtfully.

There follows a discussion about the properties of lyrium.

Safety information: It's toxic and you shouldn't touch it or breathe its fumes - a little is fine, a lot will hurt you - and you especially shouldn't let any get in your blood, you might die.

Other information: Lyrium does a lot of things. It's what makes golems able to be people instead of inert metal and stone. It can enhance armour in various ways. Caridin forges a handful of small objects from lyrium-infused metal to demonstrate some of the applications: this one is persistently cold to the touch and makes its surroundings persistently colder, this one is persistently warm in much the same way, this one glows a little more steadily than natural lyrium and with a warmer light, this one makes tiny electrical sparks when brought near conductive materials.

This has potential. If they can get something to spin consistently, or if the sparks can be turned into a circuit, or it the hot thing can be fire-hot...

How to explain the finer points of electricity on a few hundred words? She does her best.

Caridin is fascinated by this potential use for lightning runes! He creates several more and invites Walta to try to power circuits with them.

"Can you make them switch on and off? It is dangerous to build circuits with live power sources."

Well that's a fascinating problem. He mutters to himself about it and goes to try some things.

Stalas expresses the opinion that it may be a while before they see Caridin again. He asks Walta if she'd like him to go find her something to eat.

She wants to watch Caridin and thereby try to figure out how to do runes and smithing.

But food is probably a good idea.

Well, then Walta can watch Caridin and Stalas can go get food! Off he goes, taking Hesta and Pell with him.

They're back in half an hour with mushrooms and unidentified cave creatures. Caridin is still tinkering.

She doesn't ask questions. Just watches. That's how she learned to do walkers, at first.

Mushrooms and cave critters... Not appetizing much at all but probably not the worst food she's ever had. Munch, munch.

The mushrooms are sort of bland; the cave critters are legitimately delicious. Stalas nibbles on a mushroom but otherwise doesn't partake.

"You're not eating?"

"I don't need to. Long story."

"Okay, if you say so." Munch munch,

Stalas chats with the golems and watches Caridin tinker with lightning runes.

What he eventually comes up with is a lightning rune in a little box with a switch on it. Flip the switch to one side, the rune is connected to the contact points outside the box; flip the switch to the other side, and it isn't.

"That's almost exactly how switchable batteries work! Haha."

Okay, now she can take, hm, the voltmeter is very dead... She takes a spare bulb for her helmet light, and a diode and resistor to force unidirectional flow, and rigs wires held to the contact point and to the box and flips the switch.

Light!

Caridin chuckles delightedly.

Light! Walta grins - for about two seconds until she sees the diode start smoking and hastily turns the whole assembly off again. "Wow, that must be at least a kilowatt."

"What is a kilowatt?"

"Measure of electrical power. One thousand watts. Power is voltage times current. So, hm, think of voltage like..." She never had any formal training in this stuff, but you pick up a surprising amount when you spend all day on related topics.

Caridin seems to follow the explanation reasonably well. He is fascinated by these concepts. Who'd have thought lightning could be this useful?

Oh, they haven't gotten into really useful stuff yet. If she destroys some more electrical supplies to calibrate what the rune is giving... And have Caridin make a steel block to wind her wire around for a crude DC transformer and motor... Her armature could maybe run entirely on lightning runes.

That seems like it would be much more convenient than burning a kind of fuel which may or may not exist! Caridin happily sets to runecrafting.

"The fuel definitely exists. It's just that runes are a significantly more compact and independent power source than engines."

Yes, definitely. It's very exciting.

Stalas is delighted to see Caridin so engaged with a project.

Walta does get sort of quiet after a while. Her first day in a new world is either really bad or pretty good, depending on how you look at it.