There's not much to be seen, and what's there is... faded, like old paint losing its colour. The dry mud underfoot crumbles oddly at a touch, like it's halfway to dust and just waiting for someone to come along and finish the job. There's a sky overhead, with a sun in it, and both have that same faded look.

Exactly one available direction has a visible smudge of non-flatness on the horizon.

Request that a loved one assist in navigating a bizarre experience, she calls up to the Sun. 

It's conceivable that her grandparent wouldn't have noticed whatever bizarre occurrence put her here. It's not conceivable that they would refuse of their own will to respond to her when she calls to them. 

She sets her sights on the smudge on the horizon and starts walking. 

The smudge turns out to be a band of low hills. They're looking a little healthier than the flat place; the nearest one even has a few sprouts of scraggly grey-green grass, some of which might be alive.

She glows at them just on the principle that this is a Thing She Can Do and she has fewer of those than usual right now. 

Most of the wilted tufts perk back up, but one of the ones higher up the nearest hill just crumbles into grey dust like the mud of the flats.

Well, that sounds like its own problem. It's not like she's exuding Law light or anything like that. 

Trudge trudge. Once she gets far enough out of the dusty area she mutters the residual dust off her feet with some handy dandy Correspondence. 

The hills get both greener and rockier as she goes. It's pretty quiet. Eventually there's a lizard, which scuttles under a rock as soon as she comes into view, and more in that vein after that.

...She is no longer at a point where there is one definite direction to walk in. If she walks past a settlement because she was relying on a worm's-eye view for no good reason she's going to be so annoyed with herself. 

She slips off her shoes and tucks them under her arm, then lets things under her skirt reconfigure a bit and takes to the air. 

Back the way she came, the flat expanse of grey stretches out to the horizon, getting if anything flatter and greyer as it goes. Up ahead, toward the ascending sun, the rocky hills eventually give way to a carpet of conifers. Off to the left, in the distance, there's a glint that might be water flowing through the grey place toward the forest.

She heads towards the glint. 

That's a river! It's very, uh, grey.

She scoops a hand in and tastes it. 

Tastes kind of grey, to be honest. Water doesn't have much flavour to begin with but this stuff manages to have even less. There aren't visible particles of dust swirling around in it, but it does definitely leave behind greyish residue on things it touches.

She decides to follow the river. Away from the dead place. Settlements happen on the water, that's a pretty universal rule for humans, especially without Mountain-light. 

The river proceeds into the forest and the forest snuggles up to its grey-washed banks and there's a surprising lack of any settlements to be had, and for that matter of any wildlife bigger than a squirrel, as the rude foreign sun climbs toward noon in the faintly greyish blue sky. It's well past its peak and sinking toward the horizon behind her before she sees her first sign of human habitation, and it's just a flat space by the riverbank with a firepit and some rocks arranged around it for seating. It looks like it nothing but the squirrels has touched it in months.

She doesn't know enough about Surface ecology to find the lack of megafauna weird. 

She starts flying again. Eventually she has to hit people or some kind of sea, probably, and if she hits sea, she can try combing the coast. 

Trees trees trees trees trees river trees trees trees—

—big obvious dead patch in the middle of the forest some distance from the river, where the trees at the outer edge have lost leaves and needles and the ones nearer the middle are starting to slump over and in the very center there's a lot of grey-brown mud—

She throws light at the trees that look not totally dead yet and approaches the epicenter of the phenomenon.

Up close, there's more to the shape of it than just a circle of progressively worse deadness. The mud pit is not one but a cluster of several.

Illuminated trees straighten up and put out tentative little leaf-shoots. Closer to the middle of the Problem Zone, though, a few of the really questionable cases lose some pieces in the process; entire branches just fall apart into grey dust and blow away on the breeze.

This is distinctly weird. In fact, it smacks of an almost Neathy weirdness, which is compounded in its surreality by the fact that this place is so Surface-like. 

Maybe she's in an unfamiliar bit of Parabola. Well, she'll be wary of snakes. 

She keeps moving along the river.