It is indeed a desert, although not the kind of desert that stretches infinitely in all directions. For a desert it actually has a lot of decorations, like cliffs and ruins.

Lots of cliffs and ruins, the closest ones a ballpark of a day or two by horse away.

...great.

She tries to brush sand off herself, which mostly doesn't work, and then she looks around for the nearest of those odd-looking trees. A boulder would do but a tree is much easier.

There are enough of those she can find one within a couple of minutes' walk in pretty much any direction.

She takes a deep breath and wraps her hands around a sturdy branch and braces herself and pulls, and after a few seconds of straining it snaps off at the base. Then she sits down in the sand and holds it in her lap and runs her hands over it. The wood gets smoother and straighter with every pass, little by little, until she's holding a bark-textured quarterstaff. She gets up, twirls it a couple of times, nods in satisfaction, then looks around again for a direction that seems like it might contain water.

There may be such directions that might contain water but in the realm of uncertainty there is one direction right there that definitely contains a hissing scorpion the size of an English Mastiff.

"...Wow, fuck this!"

She backs away on instinct, but if it comes after her she is prepared to hit it with her stick.

How did she guess? It does! It totally does come after her! It also seems smart enough to not be immediately threatened by the stick. Or maybe dumb enough, one of those.

Turns out she and her stick hit pretty hard, much harder than would be suggested by her short chubby physique. It should maybe have been more threatened.

Maybe it should! And maybe the cracks of its exoskeleton should suggest that its best strategy would be running away. But maybe it got some brain damage from the stick to the head or something because it keeps going after her even as it is pummeled to a pulp.

Whack whack whack ugh.

She is now the proud owner of the carapace of a giant scorpion!

That's nice.

...no, beggars can't be choosers. She sits down again and gets to work.

It takes her almost an hour, twice as long as the quarterstaff, but eventually she has somehow molded the remains of the scorpion into a kind of armor-plated swimsuit, which takes some work to put on but successfully covers all her softest bits once she's got it. Also, she's no longer bleeding from the couple of places where the scorpion got her before she put it down.

That does make it easier to survive under the scorching heat of the desert sun!

She can see what is probably a cluster of plants around an oasis over yonder, maybe about twenty minutes away.

She hikes in that direction with a steady stride, muttering complaints under her breath the whole way.

As she approaches the probably-an-oasis location it resolves into actually-an-oasis! It has some rhinos around it, grazing peacefully on the grass or lazing around under the shade of some trees.

She stops well short of this gathering, puts a hand on her hip (the other hand being occupied with her staff), and glares at the tantalizing glimpse of water.

"This is bullshit," she informs it.

Ugh. Maybe, if she's lucky, she won't have to fight six rhinos for a drink.

...she's going to have to fight six rhinos for a drink, isn't she.

She holds her staff at the ready and continues toward the oasis, trying to circle around to get at its least populated side.

The rhinos are herbivores and, as such, do not have predator-style bilateral vision. Which means they can see more, if less well. Which means it is pretty difficult to escape their notice. But not altogether impossible, and there is a less populated side that is not being thoroughly watched by any rhinos.

Then maybe, if she's lucky, she can get a drink and also wash off some of this fucking sand. And not have to fight any rhinos about it.

She will successfully get to the water without any rhinos taking offense at this!

She will not, however, successfully stay as long as she probably wanted to stay there, as a roar can be heard from approximately behind her and to the right. When she looks, the actual biggest and meanest rhino she has ever seen is charging at her.

"Fuck!"

Fight it or run, fight it or run—the important thing is to pick one—she hesitates for a brief moment and then grabs her staff and bolts.

The rhino will not chase her for long; once she is far enough from the water it will give up and return to its oasis.

Great, okay.

She heads out, walking slightly faster now, in search of less well-defended water.

Nowhere immediately visible, although there are the occasional trees that probably have any water in them. Or cacti, those too.

She is not yet desperate enough to resort to cacti. But if her best known water option is Angry Rhino Oasis, she can try for the nearest cliff or ruin instead.

The environment is very uneven, and she can find the nearest cliff before she finds the nearest ruin, about half an hour's walk northwest.

Works for her.

The first thing she does when she gets there is climb to the top for a look around.

Is she looking for anything in particular? The better vantage point does not seem to be much more informative about how surrounded she is by sand and rocks and ruins, although it does sort of confirm that the closer ruins are to the north.

It also confirms that if she wanted to take shelter under this cliff she would not immediately be menaced by angry rhinos, which is a good thing to know. And it confirms that there isn't anything more interesting visible from up here, which is worse news but still useful.

Okay. Cautious thing or bold thing? ...bold thing. She can coast for a while on calculated cowardice but in a situation like this she doesn't want to coast, she wants to climb.

She takes a moment to pick up a couple of rocks and affix them to the ends of her staff, patiently molding the wood like clay until they're in there good and solid. Then she sets off toward the ruins, to see if there's anything interesting to be found there.

How about giant cobra whose head is about as large as her torso slithering towards her? That's not in the ruins, that's before the ruins, the cobra just happens to be wandering around the desert.

"Fuck you," she says to the giant cobra. "Fuck you and fuck this."

She lengthens her stride a little to try to make it past the cobra without a fight, but she's not going to bolt this time. She twirls her staff a few times to remind her hands of its new weight and keeps an eye on the cobra to track how well it's keeping up.

This cobra has rather a lot of practice slithering through the sands under its belt, so to speak; unless she actually bolts it will reach her.

"Fine."

Abruptly, she shifts from power-walking past it to charging directly at it, staff held ready to hammer it in the face as soon as said face gets in range.

It's surprised! Not for long enough that it is the easiest of targets but it is still a rather large snake with rather a lot of snake body to it, so she successfully clubs it across the head, which makes it do a rather screamlike hissy noise before it tries lunging at her.

She dodges to the side, narrowly escaping the lunge, and whacks it again.

There's a loud crack of crunched bones and the cobra looks visibly dizzy from it and does not immediately retaliate.

Too bad for the cobra, because now she is going to hit it until it stops moving and then make knives from its teeth and clothing from its skin.

Yeah the cobra is rather dead and has rather become tools for April.

Giant cobras turn out to have many useful pieces! She rips out its fangs and molds them into sharp knives, then uses those to somewhat clumsily hack off long strips of its skin, which she pinches together again like a chef sealing a pie crust and rubs with her hands to get the ick out of the insides. Once she's got enough of that to work with, she wraps some of it around her arms to make sleeves, and some around her waist to make a knee-length leather skirt, with a belt on top to hold sheaths for the knives.

At this point both her arms are red to the elbows with snake blood, and she is muttering a steady stream of curses about the heat and the materials and whatever unknown force brought her here in the first place. Nevertheless, she keeps skinning the snake, and confidently if messily butchers its remains until she has a heap of bloody bones and a snakeskin backpack full of meat. Then she rolls scraps of snakeskin into a long thin rope, lines up all the sturdiest ribs side by side, and weaves the rope through them to form a long string of snake ribs which she can then bundle up and tie to her pack.

"Okay, fire," she says, flexing sticky red fingers and grimacing. "Fire needs wood. Wood needs tree. Where tree?"

Trees abound! In the sense that there is one within a ten-to-twenty minute walk of anywhere on this desert, apparently. She can find the nearest tree to the northwest.

"There tree."

She goes where tree.

She demolishes the tree with excessive force, builds a fire, sits down, and starts banging rocks together and then working them a little with her hands and then banging them together again. Rock is much harder to shape than snakeskin and it takes her a while to get something that will semi-reliably yield a spark. After that, though, she has a tidy little campfire with which to cook her backpackful of snake steaks.

The fire is probably less-than-pleasant in the middle of an actual desert, but it does indeed provide her with cooked food.

She is not bothered by any animals much larger than they reasonably ought to be.

Then she can eat a slightly unreasonable amount of flame-roasted snake steak and then pack up the rest, dump sand over the fire, form some spare snakeskin into a pouch for her firestarters and hang it from her belt opposite the knives, and keep trekking toward that ruin.

The day starts to wane into night, and the scorching heat starts getting replaced with colder and colder winds. The sands are hot, but they release their heat fairly quickly, and while the sensation is perhaps a welcome change, it is still not altogether pleasant to travel through these extremes.

April keeps walking. She hasn't tested exactly how long she can go without sleep, but one all-nighter won't kill her and walking through the night will keep her warmer than not doing that.

It will keep her less warm than a fire would but she's probably sufficiently armoured that the walk will be alright.

The unreasonably aggressive fauna is less active but not not active at night, although none of it is particularly mega, that she encounters. As she continues north, one of the ruins she can discern resolves itself into what looks like... a statue? Humanoid? Fairly big, like three times as tall as a tall person.

Well that's a little suspicious. On the other hand, maybe the people are less hostile than the wildlife? It could happen. She can check it out and if the people turn out to be hostile she can hit them with her stick.

When she's close enough to see the people she will see a woman in simple grey furs knelt in front of the statue with her hands clasped in prayer while a handful of other people dressed similarly seem to be in the process of setting some structure up around her, although it is too early to say what this structure is. There is a campfire and some dried meat on a rack and a few buckets of water nearby, plus a few rawhide bedrolls on an elevated platform behind the statue.

She approaches cautiously, holding her staff in what she hopes is a nonthreatening way, and waits to see if anyone says hello.

Closer still, she might notice that all of them seem to be wearing identical bracelets of patterned leather with a large green gem on them on their left wrists. One of the people does notice her, and he grabs a stone axe from a pile of tools and weapons but does not raise it or use it to threaten her—merely grips it in readiness.

The others (except for the praying woman) notice this and also tense up, and the man who noticed her calls, "Hail, stranger."

Not immediately hostile, but definitely ready for hostilities.

—that isn't either of the languages she knows, and yet, somehow, she knows it.

Can she answer them in it? Let's find out.

"Uh, hello. Can you tell me where I am? I've been... lost in the desert a while."

She does seem to have acquired the ability to speak her language. Or they at least do not comment on her accent or anything like that.

"You are in the Exiled Lands, and this is Muriela's Hope, our humble camp. We are followers of Mitra."

"...and who's that?"

They look at each other and the one who's been speaking is the one who replies, again: "Mitra is the sun god. He is the defender of the good, god of truth and healing and leader of the righteous. You have never heard of Mitra, stranger?"

"We have different gods where I'm from." It's true, in a manner of speaking. Hopefully they won't immediately try to kill her about it.

The mood does become warier but there's something in the man's expression... pity? "All peoples should know of Mitra. It is a tragedy that there are places his goodwill has not yet reached." He takes a step to the side and gestures towards their campfire. "Do you wish to join us, stranger? You look like you could use friendly hands."

She hesitates. People are dangerous, people whose culture she doesn't understand more so. But as far as she can tell, they're not going to stab her in the back all of a sudden. And she could probably fight her way out if they did. Probably. No guarantees.

"...Yes, all right. I have some food to share."

"You should keep it. We have food to spare, and would not want to take away from your own supplies." He turns his back to her and walks back to the camp, and while the others are still eyeing her warily they do not object. "What is your name, stranger? I am Atiel," which she knows means 'Builder of Mitra' in whatever language it's from.

"April. I'm not going to eat this whole giant snake by myself before it spoils; I might as well share it. I can trade you for some things that'll keep longer, if that's better."

"Very well." He looks around at the rest of the camp and says, "I believe April's arrival is as good a sign as any that we should cease for the night. Brothers and sisters, come." The others stop what they're doing, putting down their tools, and walk towards the campfire to sit in a loose circle around it. Except for the praying woman. "Muriela is in her nightly prayers," Atiel explains (and Muriela's name means 'Artisan of Mitra'), "but she will be done anon."

Wow, religion is unnerving. Probably it's fine, right? She sticks by Atiel.

"Why don't you all introduce yourselves to April?" suggests Atiel, once he takes a seat.

He gestures to his right for April to sit, and his left is immediately occupied by a woman, tall and pale with long orange hair. "I am Ganela," she says, 'Muscle of Mitra', and the name is pretty apt, as even though she dropped the tool she was using to forge something next to a wooden bench she is still carrying a large iron warhammer attached to her back.

"Harriel," says another man who was working near a furnace, throwing the leather gloves he had been wearing in a corner and kneeling by the fire. His arms are also strong and he has the slight extra muscle on his right arm that is typical of blacksmiths, and his name means, aptly, 'Forge of Mitra'. His skin is bronze and his hair is intricately tied into cornrows along his skull. "It is always good to meet someone new who doesn't want to kill us," he says, grinning a shiny grin with several teeth that have been replaced by metals.

"Tendarel," says a third man, 'Spirits of Mitra' but also 'Brewery of Mitra' and 'Essences of Mitra'. He is small and dark-skinned and has his hair cropped close to his skull and his hands have what look like chemical burns. "Nice to meet you," he says, using a phrasing that is more polite than usual.

"My name is Akendela," says the last one of the group, another woman, who seems to hold a family resemblance with Tendarel, especially with her hair also cropped short. Her name means 'Architect of Mitra', or also 'Planner of Mitra'.

"We all changed our names when we joined Muriel, here," explains Atiel with a slight smile. "Mitra has changed our lives in different ways, and we have dedicated them to him in gratitude. We abandoned our old selves and are born anew in this project... which I believe Muriel is better equipped than me to explain."

Harriel is the one who fetches the ceramic bowls he starts distributing to people.

"Well. Good to meet you all too," she says, and she even kind of means it. What relatively nice people they are compared to the baseline she was expecting. "Does anybody want some snake steak?"

"Send them over, friend, I'm starving," says Harriel, grinning.

She shrugs off her pack, opens it, and distributes snake steak. There's plenty; it was a big snake.

They don't seem surprised; living here, they've probably seen more than their fair share of rather big snakes. Harriel helps distribute, and adds some berries and cactus fruit and leaves to the servings. Ganela does not get anything but the meat, but the others all accept non-meat stuff.

April is happy to eat fruit and leaves and berries along with her snake steak. She wishes she had any idea of what constitutes appropriate dinner conversation around here. She wishes she knew where here is; it's definitely not the Earth she started on but it doesn't seem much like the Wilds either, hostile megafauna aside. The Wilds are... brighter.

After a minute, she tries asking, "Where's a good place to get water near here? The last oasis I found was guarded by angry rhinos."

"We get it from there, too," says Atiel. "Ganela usually guards our back and draws the attention of the rhinos while the rest of us collect the water."

Ganela nods, at that, but doesn't say anything.

"Good to know, I guess."

She's gonna have to fight a rhino, isn't she. Unless she stays with these people, but she... kind of doesn't want to.

"There's other places," says Harriel, "but they're all wayyyy farther away." He shrugs, and takes a bite of his meat. "Nnt wrth eet," he adds, with his mouth full.

"How did you find yourself here, April?" asks Akendela, her eye falling on April's left wrist. "You do not seem to bear the exiled bracelet."

"It's a long story and I don't know how much of it I want to tell. The short answer is I got lost. Ended up wandering in the desert with no idea of where I was or how to find my way back to where I'd started."

Akendela raises an eyebrow but Atiel nods. "We all have our stories and our demons," he says. "It is enough to find comfort in each other's kindness, even if only temporarily."

Harriel rolls his eyes but grins and keeps eating.

"Yeah." That's one way of looking at it.

This is when Muriela opens her eyes and stands up from her prayer. She stretches a bit and turns around, smiling at April. "Hello, stranger, and welcome," she says, walking over to a spot between Akendela and and Tendarel and taking her seat there. Harriel offers her a bowl with some food in it and she accepts it with a dip of her head.

"Hi," she says. "I hear you're the person to ask about," she gestures vaguely at the statue, "all this."

"Yes, that would be me. Do you have questions, traveller, or do you want to hear what I have to say?"

"...I'll listen to what you have to say."

Muriela smiles and nods. "I was once deaf to the words of the divine. Just like my brothers and sisters, here," she says, gesturing with one hand to everyone else there. "We wandered aimless before Mitra brought us here, one by one. I was the first of us, but our purpose is the same. He has chosen us for a task: to invite perfection, to create perfection. A vessel for Mitra—a place for his divine essence to inhabit."

Tenderel looks up at the statue when she says this, but the others don't; they might be used to her speech, by now.

She looks up at the statue.

"Is that—a thing that works? I guess it must be, if your god told you to do it."

Her smile broadens. "And I am very close—although I dare not rush. The final moments are the most important, and I must take my time and care."

"Makes sense."

She... kind of feels like she doesn't want to be anywhere near here when they finish their god-statue. Is that reasonable? Their god sounds all right, mostly. It's just she's kind of over the whole concept of forces greater than herself. Forces greater than herself are largely to be avoided.

"And then—but tell me, do you know Mitra? It seemed you did not. He abhors blood sacrifice, and encourages the preservation of wisdom and knowledge. I believe... these lands are in need of someone to care for them, to right the great imbalances and to heal the ancient wounds that have never healed and have been torn open anew." She raises her left arm and says, "These bracelets—but you do not have one," she interrupts herself to say, when she notices. "And yet you are here."

"Yes. I got lost in the desert. It's a long story. What about the bracelets?"

"They are what traps us here... We cannot leave, with them, and we cannot remove them, and they give us visions, though we try to ignore. They corrupt us." She frowns. "And yet you... are not corrupted."

"I guess not." Hopefully this is not going to end in them deciding they need her for their god statue.

"I don't suppose... but it would be a great ask. I mustn't."

Well, she's not deciding anything, even though everyone has thought the same thing, apparently, from the looks they are giving her (while trying to not look).

She's going to regret asking this, isn't she.

"What mustn't you?"

She looks down at the fire. "My greatest fear is that... this corruption, the great evil in these bracelets... it will mar my work. Our work." She looks up at April again. "If you are free from their corruption, then... your work would not be marred. It would be pure. We could be sure that... Mitra's will is done."

"I don't think I could finish your whole statue by myself even if I wanted to." And she kind of doesn't.