A sharp band of light and shadow moves across her, glowing from one of the hallways.

Uh oh.

That's one of the hydrazine tanks. Something that makes a sharp light, plus rocket-fuel...

"Hello? Who's got that light?" She walks after it.

The light is coming from some sort of glowing ovoid, perhaps a foot or two long, flying through the halls and leaving a bright trail through the air.

"Frickfrickfrick what the hell - don't break anything please - what is it, escaped specimen?"

She kicks her suit's engine into a higher gear and pursues.

Coming to a wider patch, the ovoid loops around, coming to a hovering stop. Up close, she can see its many glowing nodules, and four glowing seams running from tip to tail.

The seams might be opening.

It doesnt move like a creature. It moves like a machine. She doesn't have a weapon- The welder or drill, perhaps.

She watches closely.

The four glowing panels open and fold down. Inside is a dull gray-green sphere; it irises open at the top, and a viridian light floods the corridor.

Is it too late to turn around and run? She turns around and-

With a loud whooshing sound, her vision fragments into countless points of light, swimming disconnected around her. There's a brief feeling of weightlessness and disconnection.

. . . Maybe not quite so brief?

Okay okay no time for screaming suit into sealed mode okay screaming now.

She screams.

And then she's back in the hallway, right where she was. There's no sign of the object.

Something is clearly wrong. Either she's having a hallucination episode or the entire complex is going crazy. Either way, time to get out, she makes for the exit.

This hallway should lead toward the exit. Instead it abruptly ends, sheared off at a slight angle, and opens onto broad daylight.

"Wha. Did it... Did it actually work?"

"Oh damn let's go make sure it didn't cut any toxic stuff in half!"

She exits and makes a fast investigatory circuit.

The first thing she sees outside is ice. Towering, glistening peaks of it, in vivid purples and greens.

The second thing is a perfectly ordinary hillside with ordinary houses. This could be anywhere in Germany, if not for the ice mountains. Anywhere but a top-secret research facility.

Walta can walk out and around the base, or what's left of it. A perfectly circular chunk of the facility.

The grass grows right up to the edge.

"...This doesn't make any sense."

Nothing in the cabin-sized chunk of machinery is dangerous - well, immediately getting more dangerous, so she walks her walker toward the... Edge. The ice.

The grass runs right up to that, too. Outside the sharp, curving edge there's only a jagged expanse of multicolored snow and ice.

As she gets close, she can see a slight disturbance in the air along the border. If she gets very close, she'll see more grass and trees superimposed,  like a reflection in a window.

Mirrored force field marking the boundary between what the hell ice-land and bucolic farming town.

This is not a thing to poke yet. Not until she understands a little more. She walks toward the town.

Where she sees a little girl, who 'eeps' loudly and runs off shouting, "MOM! THE WEIRD THING DID A THING!"

"Hey wait where am I, what's going on?"

Nope, the little girl has run off. Okay. She'll just keep walking. Not going to drop the hazmat suit yet - it's a pain to get out of and she doesn't know where she is... She'll set it into standing rest and let the engine idle, though, while she tries to make sense of the several bizarre things going on.

A little later, a well-dressed man walks up the town road toward her. "Hello, stranger," he says, spreading his arms. "Welcome to our little town of Barnstedt. Do you speak German?"

"Ja." Engine goes un-idle with a vroom so she can raise her visor. "Where on earth - or not - am I, do you know? The ice..."

"I know of no place on Earth with ice like that. I had feared we were beyond the reach of aid, but your arrival gives me hope.

Will you come have some coffee while we chat?"

"Sorry, but I know way too little about this place to willingly get out of my hazard armature quite yet. Oh and there's a lot of tanks and machinery near where I, uh, got here, best not to touch any of it."

"A most commendable caution. You are a woman of science, then? Would you be willing to lend your experience to our mysteries?"

"...Okay um. Yeah I suppose I know a fair bit of science, thought of it more like engineering to be honest. So you don't know what's going on around here? Oh, I'm Gerwalta Scharnhorst. Walta."

"And I am Josef Janssen, mayor in these trying times." (He pronounces it the German way, "Yosef".)

"No, we have not figured out much of what has been happening to us in these months since the ice came."

"Mayor, eh? Right. I can help figure out what this place is. Mysterious floating device appeared, there was a green glowing core and a bright flash and a spherical section of the - facility, appeared somewhere over there, with me inside."

"We too had a green glow and a bright flash. Our glow came from the old tree. Would you like to see it?"

"Hold on, you probably don't have fuel stores, right? And if this place is going to kill me it can kill me in an hour instead of in a day, might as well, let me get out of my power suit..."

It's a bit of a process.

"No, we have no stores of fuel. But our crops continue to grow, so we have hope that this place will not kill us."

"That's good, at least." Clank, clank, clank, the arms go limp. The back of the legs open and she stoops low to get out of the thing, revealing worn-looking and oilstained clothes, hair in a tight braid. "...I really don't know what to do next. Coffee sounds good."

Josef may notice some potentially worrying iconography on one of the tools attached to the outer layer of her metal suit.

Josef leads her from her science-fictional armor and its mysterious four-armed symbol toward his house in the middle of the town. It'll look very retro to her: nothing's electric.

Not everywhere has clankertech. She does get the 'country town' impression though. "So, I probably wanna build stuff for you all, what will I have to work with? I don't see a telephone or any electrical lines, the most workshoppy thing I've seen is that waterwheel-driven sawmill..."

"Yes,  I am afraid we are much too small a town to have an electrical research lab. Nor are we along a tele-graph line ...? Tele-phone?"

"Telephones come after telegraph and do full voice, they're everywhere in the last decade, how long have you guys been trapped here?"

He pours her some coffee. "It's been a little over two months. The start of July."

"Yeah we're from different times then. Or maybe time went faster without you or something. Or something else entirely, I think I would have heard of half a town disappearing.Do you know the year? I think it's, ah, nineteen thirty nine."

"Nineteen twelve. Tell me, how is the future?"

"...Not as good as you might think. You, lucky sir, exited the time stream barely two years before the nastiest war the world has ever seen."

"Oh? Then perhaps in time we will see this strange icy place as a blessing. Let not the war touch Barnstedt.

But let us speak of the present."

"My instinct is to poke every mysterious thing and try to figure out how it all works. Maybe a way to get home. I don't know if you guys are set for food or mechanical conveniences or what though."

"Our food stores are fine and our crops are ripening on schedule, so I think we are set for food. It shouldn't be a problem to feed you as well.

We consider our lives convenient enough, but what does 1939 mean by mechanical conveniences?"

"I'd actually have to look to see what I can make, but some ideas... Central heating for homes, meaning you don't have to keep fires, air conditioning to make things cooler, power tools like the sawmill but more portable, electric light which is steady light without flame, no candles or lanterns, I could probably whip up a really strong coffee brewer."

"We would be delighted with any of those that you decide to share with us. If you'd like priorities, I can ask around to see what would be most immediately helpful.

For the mysteries... We've seen a few. Besides whatever phenomenon brought us here, I've seen the ice, the barrier, the river, the tree, and the seeds."

"Certainly mysterious. Hm. If you guys are going to feed and house me, making stuff is only fair, asking for priorities would be good."

"Then I'll ask around while you're studying the tree or the barrier."

"...Thanks for the coffee and the organizing." He isn't a Nazi. Probably. Keep reminding yourself of that.

"You're entirely welcome. It's been too long since we had a visitor."

"Oh, I can imagine how lonely it must get... Worried you'd be cut off forever. Well. What do you already know about the tree? It's in the center of the - bubble - it produces strange seeds, one of which was where I appeared, anything else?"

"It looks different, now. More - green, more alive. And it might be growing more."

"Huh. Okay, I'll have a look and see you later, then?"