Lucien can mostly make a living off of doing divining for certain niche medical studies, but he can't do specific enough conditionals to get his grander ideas off the ground yet. Still, when portals start showing up he's well positioned to suggest to a few people that diviners like him could be useful for quickly figuring out what conditions on the other worlds are actually like.
Still, they're taking a chance on Lucien by approving his application to join the expedition, so he definitely really shouldn't be late for his first day of work. He also probably shouldn't be running along a poorly maintained trail in Bolivia, but between that and the possibility of being late he knows which he prefers.
Well, which he prefers right up until he's tripped on a branch and sent tumbling towards the portal.
This portal was not supposed to be one that let people through, what the heck?!
He drops about ten feet and hits solid rock. The sound of the impact echoes a bit; if he were a bat he might know anything about the shape and size of his present location but as it is there is no light at all.
Lucien lots out a short scream upon landing, which would also help if he were a bat.
He didn't hear anything crack, so that's good??? He sits u-nope not time for sitting up yet, it's time for curling up on the ground itself.
The cave does not object to this behavior.
The echoes die down. ...not all of the sounds are gone but that might be his imagination. Squelchy rustling? Distant footsteps?
It's pretty firm in this position. So to speak.
Then there are footsteps - muffled by the face-thing, so they must be pretty close - and a shout, and then Lucien's left ear is really really cold even with the thing on it, and it loosens for a moment, enough that he could gasp -
Not for long! It clamps down again. Then there's another flash of cold - and then it relaxes, and something yanks it away from his head.
He is going to be gasping for air for a good ten to twenty seconds this time.
"...gria." Sigh. "Uli." And then there's light, not much of it but enough to be blinding for a moment in the blackness.
When he's blinked the spots away, there's a purple woman with white hair wearing loose pale clothes cinched up around her arms and legs. The light is emanating from a cinch near her left elbow.
Wave wave.
"Dasar jiam." A complicated wave of the hand. She cups a hand over her ear and makes an encouraging gesture at him.
... well, the portal was in Bolivia.
"Hablo ingles?" he asks, putting his elementary school Spanish to use.
"Oh..." In retrospect it didn't make much sense for a purple portal person to know Spanish, even if the other end of the portal was in Bolivia.
"I um.... where is this?"
She points straight up to the ceiling. There is presumably a ceiling; there certainly isn't a sky. (The light doesn't really reach that far.) "Taldor?"
That is apparently a concerning thing to say. She cups her hand to her ear again.
He also finds this concerning.
"I'm from New York - uh, Earth. I think this is probably a different planet."
Shrug. ...she reaches into her backpack, and pulls out a big cloak, and makes to put it around his shoulders.
She then collects the corpse of the thing that was on his face, rips a little hooky appendage from it, and uses that to clip the cloak more closed at about waist height on him.
"-I um. Fell out of a portal that might let me get back home. If I can reach it."
She looks around. Waves her light-bearing arm a bit, then finds a pebble, says "uli" again while waving her hand, and winds up with the pebble glowing instead of the sleeve cinch; she offers him the rock.
"I-do you want me to throw the pebble at the portal?"
It has been a very long day. Except for how it's something like 9:10am and he woke up half an hour ago.
"Okay."
"Do you know if it would be possible for me to come back here later if I leave with you now."
Nod. Beckon beckon, this way. (She casts another spell occasionally as they go.)
Lucien follows, continuing to succeed at putting one front in front of the other, and not crying, and that's it, that's all he's really up to doing right now.
Eventually they start passing through caves that have people in them. His escort exchanges words with them. Sometimes they laugh.
The people who talk are all purple but they pass a group that includes a bulky blue guy with tusks, hauling a big sack of mushrooms, and one that includes some tiny people who'd come up to about Lucien's waist, bent over their own glowing objects and sewing. Some of the purple people are playing a dice game; some of them are performing mushroom-related actions of some kind that they don't linger long enough for Lucien to get a great sense of.
Lucien is confused about their being different types of suspiciously-human looking aliens, though probably this shouldn't be any more surprising than seeing one suspiciously human looking alien.
The sewing looks lower tech, which isn't great.
They come to a long tunnel and pass people going the other way, some of whom his escort doesn't actually need to talk to at all!
And eventually they are going up and down the stairs and ramps in a bunch of twisty passages and come to a cave, with a tiny person cooking in the dim firelight. His escort makes a rag hanging from the wall glow and says something to the tiny person, who replies with a deferential head-bob.
And then down the hall to this terminal cave here, just a room, not very big, with a hammock and a bookshelf and some folded up furniture made of bones.
She sits on her hammock. It looks big enough to sleep on but it's also low enough that she can sit there. She cups her ear again hopefully.
"-I'm surprised that you nod, it seems like it would be cultural and this isn't even my planet, I'm pretty sure. I'm also surprised that your planet has people who look similar to my species, and mushrooms. Probably those are good signs for whether you will have food I can eat."
She points at the ceiling. "Taldor. Qadira, Cheliax, Absalom, Kelesh... debna. Human."
"I'm really surprised that you have place names that sound like the sort of place names that would exist on Earth, and also that you have humans.... I guess this could make sense if humans came here from Earth.... it can't have been the other way around because we have a fossil record of human evolution."