Tanya can fly! Where is she flying?!

Standard protocol for a suddenly unfamiliar, presumed hostile sky: maximum mental speedup, maximum acceleration with random juking, illusory decoys flying out and an illusion making her look like a patch of sky which will maybe fool a novice mage for a second. What other mana signatures are there?

There are already dozens of people in the air, though none of them are moving at more than a tiny fraction of Tanya's current velocity and most of them are below two hundred feet in altitude. Every single one of them is aglow with magic, along with a few patches of seemingly-empty space. At maximum mental speedup, it's almost as if they're frozen in time, not yet having reacted to either Tanya's arrival or whatever caused it.

Another set of mana signatures are on the ground, in what appears to be a good old-fashioned melee. Humanoid figures armed with both active spells and a variety of bladed weapons are in the process of murdering one another in the midst of a series of low stone buildings and grassy strips, though if anything they're moving even more slowly than the aerial fighters.

The last mana signature is the tower itself, which is glowing ominously and buzzing like a honeybee. In addition to the aforementioned weirdness there is now a cloud of gas the color and consistency of split pea soup leaking out of holes in the mortar near the base.

None of that makes any sense. She doesn't recognize any of the spells! The fliers are too slow and the low-ranked mages on the ground are... using swords? Maybe they have a better mage blade based on a sword, but where are their guns?

Those are background, almost non-verbal thoughts. If none of them are reacting to her she'll focus on getting high up and far away from this fight.

This poses something of a conundrum. All of the other side effects of tearing down the warding on this tower are exactly the kind of uninspired, poorly thought-out traps a human wizard might think to set: Glyphs of Warding that unleash summoned monsters and Slows into the same area at the same time; evocation that lashes out without the slightest attempt to target anything useful; the really dangerous spells like Cloudkill and Symbols hidden behind decaying barriers, as if to offer the attackers a reasonable chance at escape.

The entity fleeing from the scene is not like that. A called creature with flight speed faster than a dragon and multiple Quickened illusions to cover its tracks as it leaves the scene suggests the influence of someone who knew what they were doing. It could be going anywhere to do anything, at this point, and at the rate it's moving there isn't much time to react.

Ymohrglas has a few seconds of Greater Invisibility left before he needs to retreat and recalculate, which means acting fast is better than acting carefully. He picks out the real creature among the illusions, swivels around to get a clear shot, and breathes lightning.

Tanya is of course keeping track of the (terrifyingly close-by) illusioned magical signature. When it starts casting something in her general direction, she dodges the hell out of the way. And when that something materializes in an actually-dangerous-looking miniature lightning bolt (her shield can't stop electricity!!) she responds by flying away even faster, while shooting back.

Her machine gun fires fourteen bullets a second on full auto. She can't cast explosive spells on them that quickly, of course, so over half are relative 'duds' that with luck will still serve to confuse the enemy as he tries to dodge. At this range, though, even dodged explosions should have some effect on their shield. As a bonus, they'll create smoke that will hopefully help her escape to a more reasonable range.

Her body won't thank her for pulling eight gees for a few seconds, but it will thank her for staying alive and that's what matters.

Dragons are remarkably hard to kill. They can fly fast and react faster, deflect most attacks off their scales and ignore all but the most ferocious nonmagical blows. They are born with innate magic and sorcery both, and grow into their power with only the passage of time. They are animated with even more life force than even their imposing size would naively suggest. Ymohrglas is additionally under a wide array of defensive spells, which for the next few minutes at least will render him even tougher than that.

However, despite the astonishing acuity of his senses, it is tautologically impossible to hear supersonic objects before they arrive, which means Ymohrglas is still in the process of closing his mouth and reorienting when a stream of explosive bullets disintegrates his right arm and a large chunk of his torso.

To all other observers, the already quite loud battlefield is overwhelmed by a deafening series of explosions. A moment later, most of a blue reptile the size of an elephant materializes on the roof of a nearby building.

This produces a total rout. About two-thirds of the airborne fighters turn tail and flee in every direction, their illusions moving with them to screen their retreat. The same goes for the men on the ground, although a small contingent of them will start scaling the building towards the body as soon as it appears.

Tanya has no idea what to make of the enormous flying blue lizard (??) she apparently just killed (???) but she does know the the most important fact about this situation, which is that she is getting away.

Five minutes later, Tanya is ten thousand feet up and ten kilometers sideways in a random direction, and has no idea where she is or how she came to be there. The last thing she remembers is being on a routine flight. Her orb's recordings show a clean cut, complete with a sudden loss of altitude, which makes absolutely no sense. The magic she recorded during the abortive fight makes no sense to her either. She can't raise anyone on the radio (not that it can reach that far). 

She appears not to be pursued, at least not by aerial mages.

What does the land below look like, apart from 'unfamiliar'?

She's just passed over ten kilometers of agricultural land. Long shallow lakes dug into pleasing geometric patterns visible only from above spiral outwards from the semi-urban cluster of buildings she originated at, and between them are narrow plots of cropland filled with indistinguishable green smudges. Some of the lakes have boats on them, barges with enough floor space to be visible even from a great height, but if there are any buildings down there they aren't quite large enough to stand out against the rich black soil.

At this point, she's reached the end. Before her is a subtropical desert that stretches out to the horizon in all directions below a cloudless sky. There are no roads nor tracks leading to or from this place.

The only desert she's been to is outside Turus on the Southern Continent, and Ildoa is a mountainous country. 

Was this enemy action even directed at her? There were definitely people fighting each other there and one of them might have shot at her on instinct. (And left behind the elephant-sized body of a blue lizard that definitely shouldn't be able to fly? It wasn't magical and it served no apparent purpose. Tanya is very confused right now.)

Are there any magical signatures within a few kilometers? If not, she'll try descending and asking the nearest locals where she is. This isn't very safe, but she really doesn't have any better ideas! (In theory, starting from anywhere on Earth she could fly towards the magnetic north until she recognizes something, but it could take days.)

The only magical signatures she's seen in the past five minutes are the boats. Not all of them, only most, but beyond a certain size and build quality they tend to have some magic about them. Apart from that, the land is nonmagical. At lower altitudes she can see small buildings made from adobe the same color as the soil, and even a few people who aren't cowering inside of them – at this distance the thunder was audible but attenuated, and some farmers have more important things to worry about than loud noises coming from a long way off. The weeds won't pull themselves, most of the time.

Tanya can't immediately recall a use of magic specific to ships but she'll stay far away from those for now.

She'll head towards the closest (and most isolated) building or person she can see. (Zooming in to see from a few kilometers away is easy, but she does need to know where to look.) Land just out of sight under an illusion, and then walk in. This won't fool anyone suspicious (she is, after all, wearing a uniform and visibly armed) but it can't hurt. All she needs is to establish a common language and ask what the nearest city is called. She'll be out of there at the first sign of danger or approaching magic.

The nearest person is hard at work pulling weeds growing in the cracks of a cement water channel. He's either an unusually mature-looking child or an adult man with an endocrine disorder; it's hard to tell while he's kneeling but he can't be much more than three feet tall.

Tanya's arrival doesn't immediately disturb him. It's weird for a foreigner to be out in the fields, but it's not totally unprecedented either, and why should he assume the worst?

"Good day." She starts out in (badly accented) Ildoan, for whatever that's worth.

This warrants a confused look and a quick response in a language that might be related to Coptic. It's followed by a much slower sentence, once he notices her failure to follow along, and then by what is clearly an attempt to speak a different third language which she also does not understand. When that doesn't work, he will make a gesture that realistically could mean anything and start walking away from the edge with the desert.

Tanya has never heard Coptic in her life. She didn't pick up any local languages in Turus, either. She will try the other languages she knows: Germanian, Francois, English, Russy... Not that she knows of any hot deserts in any of those countries. What on Earth is going on?

...she'll follow him. Carefully and very on alert.

While accompanied by a native, nobody pays Tanya a second glance. Most of the people they see are perfectly ordinary foreigners – they wear loose clothing in strange fashion, but it's the sort of dress that keeps the sun off bare skin and lets wind and water through on rough days, perfectly utilitarian fare. Many of them have the same condition as Tanya's guide, whatever that might be, though given they all live in the same farming village it could be an inherited trait.

The person he's taking her to clinches it: she is simultaneously an elderly woman and much shorter than Tanya. Does Tanya happen to speak Mwangi, Undermwangi, Kelish, Mzunu, Ocotan, or Taldane?

Did she somehow end up in a pygmy village? But they're not black...

In any case: no! She does not recognize any of these languages! Given the amount of languages and the total lack of overlap, she might well be in the southern hemisphere!

Tanya creates an illusion of a world map. She is lost, can they please point out where in the world she is? This is objectively a very silly question but, well.

The younger man backs away hastily from the person who has turned out to be a sorcerer, though not so far or fast as to be impolite.

The older woman is less impressed. Most adventurers out in the far reaches of Shiman-Sekh are locals paid to deal with the dire crocodiles and gnoll raiders. Foreign adventurers from far north of the Inner Sea come here exclusively for the giant godsforsaken rock that Khemet I insisted on digging out of the sand where it belongs. If this one embarked on that quest without a guide or a common tongue with the nearest city, more fool her. The local midwife doesn't prepare Share Language unless she has a day's notice.

The floating map is… well, she has seen a globe before, but not recently enough to immediately place anything on this one. She approaches, squinting, and after a moment indicates a spot somewhere in the Sahara near the geographic center of Egypt.

Huh! Tanya - is a bit surprised, apparently, even though any other possible answer would have been just as surprising.

She discards the map illusion and tries to convey her thanks in pantomime. She doesn't have any local currency, obviously, but she only took a little of their time, so this probably counts under general hospitality to wayfarers.

And then she steps out of the house and flies north. She has at least half a day's flying ahead of her, and will need to stay far from any possible magic radars (i.e. cities, military bases and ships). Unfortunately, the whole point of magic radars is that they out-range aerial mages, so she can't guarantee not being detected... Although they probably haven't upgraded their radars yet out here. In the worst case, she can fly higher and faster than any pursuing mage as long as they don't manage to surround her; she just needs to be on the lookout for planes.

At cruising speed it'll take half an hour to reach the coast. The erg in this direction is nothing but gold and red sand dunes that sit frozen on the earth, without the slightest hint of vegetation or habitation. If there are surveillance stations out here they're beyond visual range, and nothing along the way happens to trigger a radar warning.

The coast itself is inhabited, albeit sparsely. There are a few tiny fishing villages along the beaches surrounded by enough patchy grassland to support grazing animals. Out in the sea, the odd groupings of rocks large enough to pose a danger to nearby ships are politely occupied by tall marble lighthouses. Westbound at high speed, it's visually apparent when the desert transitions from arid to semiarid, with rockier terrain pockmarked by arroyos and relatively green plant life culminating in windswept cliffs and larger settlements.

Thirty minutes later along the coast is the first statue. The figure of a man standing over two hundred feet tall has been carved into the limestone precipice, the top of his elaborate headdress sitting just below the edge and his feet resting in the sea with the waterline up to his ankles. The cliffside has been reworked into a flat plane, making the region stand out as obviously artificial even at a great distance, but this enormous expenditure of additional time and effort serves no apparent practical purpose other than to provide the giant statue with a clean visual backdrop.

Tanya doesn't remember ever hearing about this statue. That's unsurprising; her historical and cultural education in this world is sadly deficient outside of the subjects the nuns thought suitable to little girls, and since she joined the army she spent all her study time on technical topics, so she's basically cheating using her first life's knowledge.

Anyway, she has much bigger concerns to unproductively mull over. Namely: how on Earth was she teleported to Egypt? Why her, why here, why in the middle of a fight that didn't seem to involve her except for a single mage that created a short-range lightning discharge (?) and also a huge dead blue lizard (???) 

The lizard could be a papier-mache mockup hidden under the invisibility illusion until she shot it and the caster. A modified flight spell could have kept it up in the air. This is not an explanation, in the sense that Tanya doesn't feel any less confused, but it's something somebody could do, which only leaves the question of why they'd do it. Tanya can't answer that question without knowing what the surrounding fight was about, and she's not about to linger here long enough to try to find out.

The mage holding the lizard could have attacked her with electricity on reflex. Maybe they were just as surprised by her sudden appearance. The unexplained bit is the electricity itself; firstly because Tanya hasn't heard of such a spell and it seems like it should go through a shield; and secondly, because how can you point electricity at a point in midair and not have it go to ground? Well, she doesn't have an actual tool to measure such things; presumably the spell forced it to a given point after which it did ground itself, and the latter step didn't happen to be visible because by then the energy had been distributed over a wide area and atmospheric conditions interfered or something. Electric discharge is instantaneous, so you only see the parts that were momentarily bright enough to form an afterimage on your retina. There, that's explained, and she'll dutifully report to Intelligence about the interesting new combat spell being used in Egypt.

It must be part of their ground-mage doctrine; the Empire has only recently begun the process of conscripting C-grade mages as heavy infantry, and has them direct their magic to shields and strength reinforcements instead of short-range attacks, but the tradeoff with enchanted bullets is a live discussion. Tanya has no idea who is fighting whom, though. The Empire never pushed the Commonwealth colonial border, and it has long since entirely evacuated its remaining forces from the Southern Continent.

That leaves one obvious and crucial impossibility, which is that Tanya was (for lack of a better name) teleported. 

She has never heard of it as even a theoretical possibility. If a spell existed that instantaneously moved people and things, it would revolutionize - well, everything. Tanya's mind spins just considering the obvious possibilities. And if someone did invent such a thing, why reveal its existence by using it on her? (Without killing or capturing her in the process?) Even if the rest of her unit was taken out in similar fashion, she's on her way back home to report!

Her orb recorded many different entirely unfamiliar magical spells at the fight. That shouldn't be possible. Even aside from everything else, it would represent a colossal failure on behalf of Imperial Intelligence.

Tanya will go home and find the rest of her unit alive and well hand over the recording to someone more qualified to deal with this headache. She wouldn't wish this on Visha's friend in Intelligence, so it might be Dr Schugel again... well, that's daydreaming. On she flies.

It turns out to be a whole range of statues, spaced just far enough apart that handful at most would be visible at a time from sea level. They're not not Egyptian in style – every single one of them is equipped with the extremely recognizable crook and flail iconography, either held in hand or tied to a belt – but the quality of the faces in particular is stunningly accurate, as if the subjects had posed nicely for the artists to complete their work. The procession goes on for kilometers, dozens and dozens of statues peering sightlessly out into the void.

There are also what look like people lounging on the convenient horizontal components of the sculptures, though if any of them can even notice Tanya as she passes, they don't seem to be trying to get her attention. To the naked eye they look a bit like immobile dark spots on the lighter sandstone.  None of them have any magical signature.

She'll fly a bit farther out to sea just to be sure. And zoom in on one of the dark spots with an optical-spell lens, out of a habit of situation-awareness and simple curiosity.