This place is a warm desert rather than a cold one. He's on a crumbling road that winds through brown hills. An old gas station, currently empty and abandoned, stands at the top of the hill, and there are a bunch of people down at the base doing something that involves a lot of digging and several military-style trucks clustered along the road itself.

Can't a man walk in peace from Storasta to Boligar anymore?

...Gord doesn't recognize the place, or the terrain, or the... vehicles? Things with many weird wheels? Nothing seems immediately hostile (or particularly Abyssal), the people all look human as far as he can tell from here, but he can't imagine where around the Wound this might be. Irrisen, maybe? He has no idea what Irrisen is like.

Has he been seen? Can he still hide? He isn't sure he should hide from them but when in doubt...

They haven't seen him yet. Several of the people down there are holding long rifles in slings or at a low carry. They don't have a consistent uniform or obvious armor, just a vague pastiche of desert camo and blue collar tough-wearing clothes. Leather boots and thick pants and the like. A man is scanning the horizon off to the - north or south, the sun is behind Gord - with a pair of binoculars.

They have no weapons he can identify, which is worrying because everyone has some weapons, and no visible armor either. They're holding tools of some kind but he doesn't know what they do. Maybe they have mages, or security he hasn't seen yet.

He can approach them and ask for directions, and hope he isn't attacked on sight because he pings Chaotic Evil or because he's alone and looks like easy prey or because he's trespassing. 

He could try to sneak up and eavesdrop, but if their magic detection beats his spells or they spot him anyway they're much more likely to become hostile.

Or he can walk away, and hope to find a smaller group of people to approach, without so many objects he doesn't recognize. He's self-sufficient and not in any particular hurry, and could prepare better spells for approaching strangers tomorrow.

Normally he'd pick the third option, but he's never been so lost before. What if there are novel monsters or greater demons or something else he's not prepared for around here? Going into a completely unknown wilderness alone isn't safe. 

...he'll try to approach them and save the sneaky spells for running away if they're hostile.

He hails them once he's close enough to be heard but still out of normal bowshot.

They yell back! The tone seems tense and wary but not of him, particularly. Binoculars guy is now scanning the ridge behind Gord.

It transpires that they don't know any language Gord does. They wave him closer.

On a closer look it looks like this work crew is burying large heavy metal cylinders, each as wide around as a man and maybe four feet tall, in a rough staggered line every twenty feet or so. They're also carefully burying long wires coming off each one leading back to the road, and generally treating them kind of cautiously.

...Gord isn't sure what they speak in Irrisen. People say it's all witches dancing naked in the snow but even if those exist there are obviously prosaic parts too.

Will one of them accept a Share Language? He has a Comprehend prepared too, in case of demons, but Share Language is much better if one of them trusts him to cast on them. Hopefully he'll get someone who'll be willing to spend a few minutes talking to him.

(Gord offers his outstretched hand, makes the sign for 'casting' with the other, and says the words to the spell in case one of them recognizes that.)

Major Arnold Stets has lived on the ill-named planet of Cedar Rapids for his entire life. He grew up on a farm, and was a pretty good shot with Grandpa's old rifle. The family ate Dirt Lizard often enough, with his hunting trips. It helped. He joined Cedar Rapids's paltry self-defense force years later, having discovered a talent for small unit tactics after leading a posse against a band of dispersed pirate infantry and helping convince them to limit the raid to just Minnie Downs and the steel mill there, rather than also looting all the surrounding towns.

They don't really have a lot of resources. The entire planet has a single lonely lance of 'mechs, and no real supply of tanks and the like either. The one thing they do have in relative abundance is AC/2 and AC/5 field guns, from the Intyre & Sons armory which sells them offworld, occasionally.

This little minefield is his own personal scheme, laid down on the most likely approach to the small city of Minnie Downs, just barely short of the maximum range of AC/5 field guns from a solid defensive ridgeline up the way. The idea is that the pirates come in overconfident, get fired upon by the guns, spread out to take them down, and then the command-detonated mines go off.

Anyway, sure, he'll shake this stranger's hand. Hermit or something, is he?

Share Language (Hallit).

"Hello. I'm Gord, a cleric of Gorum. I was in Mendev when a magic trap landed me here." This is less alarming than 'I fell through the literal Abyss'. "Where are we, please?"

"Major Arnold Stets, Cedar Rapids PDF*. We're on Cedar Rapids, near Minnie Downs. That's a planet and a city. What in the scum-sucking fever dreams of pirates did ya do to me, lad? Is it gonna melt my brain?"

*said as 'pee-dee-eff', like it's a loanword

"It's the spell Share Language, do you not have it here? It's standard where I'm from. It'll give you knowledge of my language for a day and a night, no other effects."

"We call the planet Golarion. Mendev is in the north of Avistan, on the border of the Worldwound - the giant rift into the Abyss." Everyone in the world has heard of the Wound, right?

Arnold sounded like he was answering 'where are we' with the name of the planet, but that's presumably a joke, interplanetary teleports are the stuff of archmage legends. People from off-world come from other planes. Elysium probably has planets but this really doesn't feel like Elysium.

"Okay, well. Magic? That's impossible, I want to say, except it clearly happened. Never heard of a system called Golarion. You picked kind of a bad time to show up here though. A particularly infamous band of pirates, Kelly's Murderers, is approaching the planet and will land in about thirty hours."

"...The translation spell might not be working correctly." Maybe this man speaks a strange language with strange concepts that don't match Gord's. "When you say 'planet' do you mean - a world, an enormous ball of earth, if you walk some direction you'll end up where you started after a few years and oceans, it flies through space around its sun and there are others that are too far away to teleport too?"

Gord's been friends with Ramien long enough, he's practically an expert on planets by now. Planets aren't the kind of thing that - a band of pirates will land on in thirty hours, that might be happen to a city or a little island, a planet is actually much much bigger than the places pirates can happen to!

"Yeah. Hold on a sec."

He goes to one of the trucks, saying some things to the rest of the locals as he goes, and comes back with a little handcomp. There's a picture on it.

"That's a leopard class drop ship. Not the exact one the pirates're using but same type of ship. They hitch a ride in on the jump ships which teleport from star to star, and take basically whoever can pay, and then come steal whatever's not nailed down because they can, and kill or kidnap or rape lots of folks also 'cause they can. We're setting up a field of bombs. Which I wouldn't tell you about except you can clearly see for yourself. The hope is that they're too lazy or stupid to see it, or at least that it slows 'em down out of caution."

The illusion - no, it's not magical - the weird picture has no scale and Gord can't figure out what the background is. It looks like it has... two pairs of ears? Probably he thinks of them as ears because Arnold called it leopard-class.

One ear has a painting of (maybe) a tree, flanked by two scimitars, on a yellow shield. It has the general style of a holy symbol, but it's not one Gord recognizes.

It definitely doesn't resemble a ship in any way. There are what might be two doors on the front boxy part, and if they're human-sized then the whole thing might contain a few dozen men, but it looks like it's metal and it has no sails or oars or keel. Anyway, ships don't 'jump', people don't (routinely) teleport between stars, and they're not on a star to begin with.

Comprehend Languages. "Can you please repeat that in your native language? I think something went wrong with the translation." Gord has never heard of that happening, translation spells work even on Abyssal dialects that humans can't even pronounce, but it's best to make sure.

"...Sure. I'll be a little more descriptive too. I thought everyone knew what jumpships and dropships were. Yeah, that's a Leopard dropship. See this little white line? That's a line of windows. These boxes here, fusion engines, they produce super-hot gas that flies out and makes the dropship fly. The wings are for controlling its flight in the atmosphere. It'd barely fit on my old farm, and the doors let out battlemechs. Jumpships stay far away from the planets in a deep wide orbit. It takes three days to charge, then they teleport from one star's outer orbit to another's. Only from specific spots, for some arcane reason I don't understand. Dropships can attach to them and get carried along when they jump. Then the dropships use their fusion engines to accelerate towards the planet, enter orbit, then fall down and land in a controlled manner on the surface. Then they can take off again later, once they've stolen to their heart's content in the case of pirates. That's how folks get between planets around here."

The Comprehend didn't make things any easier. Which is good because his magic is working properly, and also likely to be bad in case what Arnold's saying is true.

It's a ship that flies? And jumps and then drops back down - no, he's saying different kinds of 'ship' jump and drop. And there's hot gas that flies and also makes the ships fly. Those things are wings - two pairs, like a dragonfly? - they seem very small in proportion to the body... And he says it's as large as - a very old dragon? Or a really big seagoing ship, Gord supposes. With people inside it, who come out to fight, or - no, something called battlemechs comes out. Presumably to fight, given the name, but what are they fighting out in space, each other?

And they teleport between stars, which is way more impossible than teleporting between planets (or so Ramien says). Using arcane magic, recharging every three days. Well, no reason other planets can't have better wizards than Golarion, except that it makes it weird that they haven't visited Golarion. Maybe they have and Gord just doesn't know it, he really has no idea what archwizards get up to in their free time.

So anyway, that's all jumpships, and then they have attached dropships, so called because if you detach them from the jumpship with its (implied) Interplanetary Flight spell they drop. On whatever planet happens to be nearby. And then presumably they cast some kind of massive Feather Fall when they get close to the ground.

This all sounds terribly complicated compared to just teleporting directly between planets, but Gord probably couldn't understand those arcane reasons even if Arnold did.

"I can't say I understand the tactical implications of all that. But you're expecting people to walk in to attack you, so that a field of bombs would stop them?" Why wouldn't they just teleport the last leg too?

"Yeah. They can't land right in the city, we'd swarm them. Too much cover for us to get close, too many ways to disable the dropship. So they land somewhere outside, set up a perimiter, and sally out to raid. One of three plausible routes is through here. Don't know which they'll try yet. Or even if they'll go for this city instead of another. We have cannons up on a ridge, ranged to shoot at them as they're going down that hill. Those won't stand up to battle mechs in a straight fight at all, but if they go straight down the road and start getting shot at, the tactic I expect is to spread out and rush forward to overwhelm the field guns instead of letting us wear them down at range. So they rush forward, over the bombs, and get blown up. Hopefully."

Gord knows about cannon! It doesn't work well on infantry unless they're in a dense formation and blunder into the wrong location, and even then landing a second shot is hard, but scattering people off their marching route sounds plausible. 

This means the pirates might have some teleporting wizards (separately from teleporting ships), but not enough to bring in their main force into the town that way, so they have to attack overland. And they're afraid of dropping their ship itself into the town. This is beginning to make some kind of tactical sense.

One of the parts that don't make any sense is a major in the local army (?) disclosing his secret plan to a stranger from another world who didn't even ask about it. Is he trying to recruit Gord into helping them, are they low on clerics? He said Gord could see the bombs anyway, but in fact Gord can't recognize bombs and also he hadn't seen the cannons!

"What are battle mechs?"

Well, this guy sure doesn't seem like a pirate. The magic has him off balance too. That's really not something explicable. LosTech or something.

...Besides, this is a plan that only really works against incautious idiots. It's not like some secret spy scheme. It's not hard to figure out if you're paying attention, can see the disturbed ground, and can see the sensor traces of the field guns, and he's pretty sure it won't actually work at all. Just sure enough that it's worth trying really.

He's tapping his foot.

"Huge metal walking or running fighting machines. Mobile, with lots of firepower, and also armor. Much nimbler than ground vehicles, very deadly really. As opposed to Battle Vehicles, which have wheels or treads instead of legs. Cheaper, slower, weaker, more fragile. Let alone foot infantry. I don't suppose you've got something that can disable a 'mech pilot from a mile away?"

Armored metal golems with fire spells, got it. Gord has no special advantage in fighting those. "They have pilots guiding them from a mile away? And I assume they keep some battlemechs back to defend themselves, along with regular guards. ...No, I don't have any spells that work a mile away." Or at least no spells that hurt people from a mile away.

"...I can heal people. Wounds, disease, poisons, curses and so on. And create food and water. I'd like to see the town to trade those and learn more, but I'm not sure I should stay for an impending attack where it doesn't sound like I'd be much help." This is the diplomatic version of saying he's not sure he should make himself of much help in the actual fighting, although it'd be an easy decision to help defend civilians who aren't fighting back.

"No, the pilots are in the 'mechs... There are autonomous 'mechs but that's Star League stuff. LosTech. Well, we're not about to try and conscript you. Healing? More 'magic'? Could be quite a boon, we'll pay for that at least I'm sure."

He rubs his beard.

"I'm the only one who can understand you, right?"

So the pilots are inside the metal golems, presumably safe from any magic that requires line of effect. (The golems obviously won't have windows. If you can make a magic golem surely you can make a magic way to see outside, keeping the pilot safe from enemy mages.) And they're so dangerous that the locals are only willing to strike at them from a mile out - that's farther than even the canons Gord knows! 

...nope, he's got nothing. If they didn't have magical defenses, maybe infiltrate their camp, catch them when they're not inside their golems? A competent (and well disciplined) crew would just stay inside the golems for as long as they're on the planet... Anyway, if they're masters of arcane magic there's nothing he can realistically do.

"You're the only one right now, yeah. I can prep another Share Language to give someone else, it'd be the last one for the day but it lasts for twenty-four hours."

"I would've had you do it to a staff aide if I'd known, I'd rather not leave my troop to show you around."

"Is there someone you can spare that I can do it to? Or give me a letter to carry into town to tell them that I want someone to cast it on?"