:Doriath's border is clearly defined, at least. The others are more nebulous. And the gap between the lands they claim and the lands they occupy can sometimes be significant,: he answers. :The war has been fought, cold and hot, for two gross years, or thereabouts.:

Tanya needs a moment to place the word. :Two... hundred and eighty eight years?!: That's ridiculous! The longest-named war on Earth was the Hundred Years War and that was already ridiculous all by itself!

...but no, he did say 'cold and hot'. There may not have been many 'hot' periods - this may not be a period of hot war, even - but people can hold grudges more or less indefinitely. One or both of these adversaries must have a natural defensive advantage, like England in the fourteenth century, or else they might lack a way to take and hold land, like premodern armies that pillage the land but can't reduce fortresses... Didn't the Roman-Persian wars last for eight hundred years, always returning to the same borders in the end, until the Muslim armies swept them both?

:How hot has the war been lately?: This is a clearly temporary camp, but that doesn't mean much.

:I'm not sure how you would rate it, but this location was raided by Finrod's forces yesterday.:

Which, if this is a trick of the Enemy, she would already know.

:I can't discuss any other operations that may or may not be in progress locally.:

:Of course - I did not mean to ask you about such.: Well, it's at least hot enough for cross-border raids, which - doesn't tell her much, really. :You mentioned humans; do they have their own polities as well?:

:They do, in the form of scattered small villages and petty kingdoms. Many of these choose to become vassals of Angband in return for knowledge and protection from attack, which is where the humans in our army mostly come from.:

Mmm. Well, that's reasonable. 

Tanya's not sure what else to ask about, given that she intends to eventually go her way. She wants to to know about local technology and science, about laws and societies, about beings masquerading as gods, but none of those are topics for a short conversation with obvious referents.

She wants to know if any of the locals have flight magic, but if they do it's obviously rare or secret or the camp would have aerial sentries, and she can't ask him about military secrets. (If some factions but not the orks have flight, they would have lost the war by now.)

She wants a map, obviously, that's probably safe to ask for. And she would love to have two weeks' rations but that would risk both deliberate and accidental poisoning, and she'd rather go hungry than get the runs while alone in the the wilds of a warzone on a strange planet.

:Would you mind showing me a rough map of the continent, or the whole world if possible?: She won't trust it, of course, premodern maps were atrocious, but it might be better than nothing. Whether a military officer has an actual map in easy reach or has to resort to crude drawings will also tell her something - although, to be fair, he might have good local maps that he will reasonably not show her.

:Certainly,: he agrees, before calling in the gutteral Orkish tongue to one of the guards, who rushes into the camp. The guard returns a few minutes later with a hand-drawn map:

(Click through for non-blurry version)

:We're here in Beleriand. You can see Doriath and Angband marked:

Tanya failed to anticipate a novel projection but of course that's her own fault. This might not even be a projection, it might be a half-globe as seen (imagined, she presumes) from space. More likely a projection, though, those two narrow stretched-out continents on the sides look like some kind of deliberate foreshortening effect. Unless they are opposite edges of the same supercontinent occupying the globe's other side?

On a local scale, though, the map is woefully undetailed. It's almost as if someone deliberately made a map with the minimum level of detail you'd need to show a visitor from another world! 

But assuming they didn't create it with magic on the spot, and given the clear effort that went into making and preserving it - and it definitely looks hand-drawn - she can't think of why anyone, let alone a small military camp, would have such a map? Unless...

The map puts all the regions Dorvulk mentioned - Angband, Menegroth - close together. It makes the whole region look small and inconsequential. No-one calling themselves the Free Peoples' Glorious Liberation Army would deliberately choose to do that, and she doubts this world is advanced enough for map-making conventions to be standardized worldwide. So this map must have come from elsewhere; perhaps as a trade item from a distant, much wealthier civilization, prized for telling the locals about the world beyond their ken, and then faithfully copied.

Some of the continent she's on is out of sight - or no, there's an annotation of a 'region of everlasting cold', which implies a pole which they perhaps cannot cross. But a third of the map is wasted on a featureless ocean in order to center it on the... Lands of Harad?

Tanya resolves to visit Harad.

:Thank you, that was helpful,: she says after studying the map for a minute. (Her orb recorded it much more quickly than that, of course.)

Now, how to extricate herself. She doesn't want to give away that she can fly, if at all possible, and she will in fact walk back out of their sight before taking off under an illusion.

But the fact that she's planning to travel far away (with few visible supplies), in possibly hostile territory, can't really be explained without knowing about that. And they'll see her tracks vanish; she can make an illusion decoy that'll keep walking away but not one that will make a track accounting for whole day's travel.

(Any rational commander will send scouts to keep track of her for at least a few hours and possibly much longer; that's not discourtesy, that's common sense.)

:I thank you for your time and your consideration. My own duty as a soldier is, of course, to return to my own world if at all possible. With that in mind, I cannot at this time accept your generous offer of hospitality. Perhaps some other day, when I learn more of this world and if I fail to quickly effect my return, I will contact you or another division of your army again. I will in any case remember and report that you and yours treated me peacefully and courteously, and return the favor if I am ever in a position to do so.: Will they let her walk away now?

He gives her a deep nod, just short of a bow.

:I wish you the best luck in arranging your return. Should your method prove repeatable, I hope you will convey to your Emperor's diplomatic corp an invitation to journey to Angband to discuss the possibility of further contact between our peoples. And should you be unable to find your way home, know that we always have use for men and women of courage and integrity in the Free People's Glorious Liberation Army.:

The captain makes no move to interfere with her retreat — although he does flare with silent ósanwë targeting several other spots in the camp.

Then she will return his near-bow and walk away, while unobtrusively bending light in front of her cheek to create a crude rear-view mirror and being ready to bolt at the first sign of danger.

If nothing interrupts her she'll walk briskly for an hour or so, until she's behind a couple of hills and is unobserved as far as she can tell.

Orcs do not have the perfect-to-extreme-distances eyesight of Elves, but their eyesight is still better than that of Men ... at least at night. But now it is mid-morning, and she has been leaving clear tracks, so her surreptitious followers are, indeed, hanging back around the curve of the hill.

Tanya finds a stream of water and walks on its bed down the hill, as if trying to obscure her tracks.

She illusions herself invisible, and at the same time creates an optical decoy that will keep very slowly picking its way down the stream-bed. It's another illusion and it can't make sounds or leave tracks without additional spells, and indeed it won't even keep following the stream or the ground level once she can't see well enough to direct it, but it might serve to confuse a well-hidden observer who was lying in wait for her.

And then she up, as fast as she can without making an undue whoosh. By the time she lets the decoy disappear, she's two miles up.

Does anything appear to go wrong with her plan?

A few minutes after her ascent, a group of three orcs quietly makes their way to the place where she entered the stream, and then begin following the stream down its length, presumably to attempt to pick up her tracks again.

They're not likely to decide she can fly, at least if they didn't already suspect it or know of others who can. She'll always have an illusion up while flying; she can sustain it indefinitely if she's not fighting or doing anything else, really.

High, high up in the sky is an aerial mage's rightful place. The only place she can try to relax when she's on the front. The sun blazes down in a blue sky. Other humans are maggots crawling on the distant earth while those like her rain down death at their pleasure.

This warzone is very quiet. No boom and whistle of artillery, no drone of airplanes, no sources of magic darting about. The ground below is practically pristine. No trenches filled with a morass of bloody mud, no moonscape of craters, no wheel-tracks and abandoned bodies marking trails across a giant steppe. Just... undisturbed, pristine, premodern greenery. The orks and elves must lack the industry and the population size to turn their earth into Hell.

She can almost believe it's better this way.

Pfft. Is that your angle? 'Industrial war is hell, better to live without medicine or factories as Being X intended?' No, Tanya is firm in her faith that humanity can improve its condition and solve its own problems. After all, it would be utterly irrational to fail to do so.

This is a warzone, if an oddly idyllic one, and she is not a party to these hostilities but she will not for an instant let herself forget that the locals are busy applying all their undoubted ingenuity to devise novel means of mass murder. This world has magic and could contain anything, really. What goes with orks and elves? Men with enormous swords fighting dragons and... dungeons? She hopes there are no demons and angels, at least, both would probably be very obnoxious.

Now then. She would like to visit the dwarves (north past the forest), who are neutrals and open to trade. In the longer term she'd like to visit Harad, but if that map was of a half-globe and the world's radius is the same as the Earth, it would take her several days to get there if she doesn't push herself.

She'll also need food at some point; she's had basic training in preparing game in the field (Eastern Command was willing to grasp at any straw) and though she has no actual hands-on experience, she can hack her way through butchering a large-enough corpse and she isn't going to undercook meat... but alien species are a completely new concern, not to talk of diseases and parasites. It might be best to wait a day or two, in case she can find more friendlies she can trust quickly, and then start introducing local meat slowly without waiting for her rations to run out.

North, then, over the forest. What does its magic aura look like up close? Does it at all seem like it stretches high up, should she go around it?

She'll also be on the lookout for more ork (and other) detachments, camps, roads, towns, farmsteads, etc., even though she doesn't intend to approach any in this area.

The magic of the unspoiled forest is wild and untamed: it does not take on simple shapes, but arranges itself in a grand figure of infinite detail, each organism in the forest adding notes to a glorious symphony of unimaginable complexity that links the entire woodland into a single beating pulse. The only discordant note comes from a fortified logging camp, filled with more Orcs, to the north and west, on the other side of the forest.

And it's only about half a mile (or, as the Orcs would say, 800 meters) tall in most places. There are swells and spires above some of the oldest-looking trees, but she should be perfectly capable of flying over it.

This is completely unlike any magic in Tanya's previous world! In fact she'll just go ahead and conservatively assume she fundamentally doesn't understand how magic operates here.

As far as Tanya knows, magic is the result of the application of a mage's will, limited by that mage's mana. Few people are born as mages and nobody knows why, or what mana is or how magic operates on the level of physics.

The direct use of magic has been practiced since prehistory and is borderline useless. The easiest way for a mage to boil a kettle of tea is to chop wood and carry water. The mages of ages past laboriously built elaborate apparatuses and complex chemical processes that could convert a spark of magic into something precise and repeatable... but they never significantly affected either technology or society. 

Until the invention of the modern computation orb. In just a few decades, applied magic went from the equivalent of abacuses to general-purpose programmable computers. Vast swaths of modern industry rely on mages as vital work force, to say nothing of the military, and they compete desperately to hire them. The Germanian Empire, the world's indisputable leader in computation orb technology, has even gone so far as to conscript sufficiently capable mages, giving its army and vital industries first right of refusal on their labour.

That was the happy world Tanya Degurechaff was reborn into, precious human capital that could rise in society even after being orphaned and abandoned as an infant... So of course some idiots with no understanding of basic game theory blew up a minor border conflict into a world war that has already ruined three major nations and is on track to destroy all the rest in the next few years. (Good riddance to the commie bastards, pity about the rest.)

What magic in Tanya's world decidedly did not do was appear somewhere all by itself.

It would take several hundred skilled mages with modern equipment to produce a total output of magic comparable to this forest, assuming they had a (completely ridiculous) spell that would produce such a complex and well-synchronized flow. Of course, having gone to such lengths, they would use the magic productively rather than just letting it swirl about. This enormous mass of magic must be actively achieving some goal that could not be done at lesser cost, or perhaps it is reactive or defensive in nature...

Is what Tanya would think, if she were in her old world. And then she'd give this forest a very wide berth, because the people behind this massive spell would surely have a lot of magical firepower reserved for unwelcome intruders.

But consider: there are orks logging a piece of piece of this forest. Perhaps they have negotiated with the forest-mages for access. Dorvulk didn't mention the forest as a separate faction, so it might even belong to them. But nobody in control of this much magic would be cutting down trees with manual labour, let alone burning them for fuel. That leaves several possibilities.

One: the local mages (orks or not) command enormous amounts of magic and highly advanced spells, but cannot use them for any practical purpose.

Two: this spell is serving some vital strategic purpose that no mages can be diverted from. And they are crazy enough to let her get this close, where she can observe their work and report on it to their enemies (or even disrupt it) without asking her to go the long way around, or indeed trying to shoot her down from the sky. And also their forces are fighting a war with bows and arrows. This possibility can be dismissed.

Three: this magic is being wielded by an isolationist faction that is so technologically advanced that it simply doesn't care about the local orks and their enemies (and their bit of logging). 

Four: this magic is not being produced or controlled by people, but is a naturally-occurring phenomenon of some kind. Nature can produce things of stunning complexity. And if magic can exist without people, it is subject to evolution.

Any people faced with such an obvious resource would use it (and possibly use it up). Unless they don't know how. Unless they cannot even see it in any detail - just as Tanya could not without her orb.

Tanya could, in theory, go up to the flow of magic and try to manipulate it. Even though that is not a thing you are supposed to be able to do with magic that is not your own and even though the best she can reasonably hope for is to disrupt whatever organized thing it is doing.

Tanya is not an insane scientist, so she wisely flies the long way around this forest before continuing north.

Past the forest lies a verdant grassland, lightly dotted with the occasional small cluster of houses surrounded by outlying farms. The land is covered in bumpy hills that slowly grow larger until they merge with the mountains to the north.

No more camps of Orcs are in evidence, but there is what looks like a supply caravan wending its way south under guard. Other than that, the land is remarkably sparse.

The mountains themselves have even less evidence of habitation; any Dwarves living there apparently have very little need for surface structures. There is a stone tower built skillfully into the cliffs surrounding one of the passes that is visible from quite a distance.

Good, peaceful productive civilization! Or at least peaceful-looking productivity at the local civilizational level. Are the houses she sees on the way populated by orks or humans or some third species?

Either way, this bears out what she was told: this is a fertile land only freshly occupied. The elves may have claimed it, but they did not settle it recently or in large enough numbers to leave behind clear evidence in ruined roads and structures, let alone whole cities.

(Unless they're nomads? Farming peoples found it surprisingly difficult to push into the great steppes in Earth's history, despite much better organization and an overwhelming numerical superiority... This land looks suitable for crops, but Tanya is by no means an expert. Besides, the local crop species might be different.)

The stone tower is an obvious place to approach. (A flyer always has to be careful not to cross state borders accidentally.) She will again land out of sight, dismiss her illusions and approach on foot.

If the tower's lookouts are any good they will realize they didn't see her walk up the road from as far as they can see, but that would take her most of a day; if pressed she can say she walked under an illusion without revealing that she can fly.

The houses contain a mixture of humans and orcs, although somewhat more the latter than the former.

The approach to the tower is full of switchbacks. Partly because this is a mountain, and partly because it clearly forces people to either charge up a steep slope or pass through the tower's field of fire multiple times. The road does run past the tower in such a way that not every crossing needs to involve disturbing the people in the tower. But when she clearly seems to be approaching the tower, a slot opens at waist level, revealing a pair of flinty eyes.

"Drathek ve?"

Tanya approves! These are sensible people who have good defenses and are actually using them instead of fighting a war beyond their borders. (The layout also confirms that the locals are not expecting aerial assaults.)

"I apologize, I do not speak your language," she says and also tries to think at him. She doesn't know how the local telepathy works but she didn't need to use her magic to talk to Dorvulk, and there seemed to be an element of - intentionality? Not that she had the time to experiment. Hopefully this guard can call someone who can use it, just as in the other camp. A border post should find telepathic translation even more useful than a random army camp.

Thinking at the guard does not seem to produce any particular results.

"Pedil edhellen?" he tries, in what is clearly a different language, much more sibilant and flowing. "Khazâd. Sindarin. Khe ŋas."