It is an avian humanoid, though the resemblance to a bird of prey extends beyond the wings growing from its scapulae to talons on its digits and yellowish scales on its extremities. It's lying naked on the ground, eyes closed as it bakes gently in the midday desert sunshine, but nearby is a pile of stained rags and what might be an unstrung shortbow or spear-thrower. On the next ledge over are a few more engaged in the same activity, plus two younger ones alternating between throwing a small rock back and forth and running in circles. They sit at the uncanny midpoint between abject poverty and feral existence.

They climbed all the way onto the statues (presumably there are internal stairways she can't see) in... wing costumes? Truly, folk traditions cannot be comprehended, only cataloged. (Tanya judges them for letting children run around on a platform without railings, though.)

Presumably they know better than to let themselves get heatstroke, lying on hot stone in the midday sun.

As she contemplates this, a perfectly comprehensible voice whispers directly in her ear.

"Thank you for your assistance! Your share of the reward comes to sixteen thousand four hundred gold scarabs. Would you prefer cash or bank transfer?"

This is accompanied by the spontaneous appearance of a singular point of magic (otherwise invisible) ten feet away from her head.

Evasive maneuvers!!! The sudden magic signature is thoroughly exploded!!!

It doesn't attempt evasive maneuvers of its own, and the reason why becomes apparent: it's not attached to anything physical. The disembodied magical signature ignores everything thrown at it, like an illusion rather than a heavily shielded target, but it only follows Tanya at a comparatively sedate pace.

At the sound of the explosions, almost all of the people on the rocks take flight – nonmagical flight, that is. They are definitely flying by making use of their biological wings, in the manner of birds rather than aerial mages dressed like birds. All of them are flying away from Tanya's general direction, except for the ones that for one reason or another cannot fly, and those take to cowering behind what passes for cover on the statues.

It's moving at a very slow approximately-constant speed, so she can and does get away, but she has no idea what the fuck it is. How did it suddenly appear? Where is the caster? What is it doing? There was something like an illusion of sound (another thing thought impossible!!) and it said some nonsense but she really wasn't listening at the time! 

She powers the strongest optical spell she can hold for a few minutes and will release it immediately if anything else like that happens. The magical signature is falling far behind and she'd rather keep this in reserve than blast it and its vicinity.

She has decoys out and an invisibility illusion, discarded the lens the moment she was attacked, and doesn't know or care what the people on the cliff are doing.

It continues to trundle after her without the slightest bit of acceleration, and soon it disappears into the distance behind her without having done anything else that she can detect.

The remainder of the statues are barren. Everyone has either heard her coming or gotten the metaphorical memo. The statues number in the low hundreds total, and at the far end the cliffs slope down once more into an enormous marshy delta that looks like it was last occupied by civilization at least a century ago. There are the angular remains of razed buildings and uninhabited cities, but no signs of people anywhere. It's too large to see the source of the river feeding the delta, but it must be coming from somewhere far inland.

If Tanya remembers her maps of the Southern Continent well enough, she may notice the absence of the Gulf of Syrtis.

Tanya remembers the local geography very well! She fought a campaign here just last year, and half of that consisted of chasing enemy mages around the desert. But they never went east to Egypt (*) and that's where she must be now; there's no other large delta on this coast. That also explains why she never heard of those statues. 

(Gulf? What gulf? There's no gulf for a thousand kilometers west of the Nile.)

It is a little puzzling that she's only now crossing the Nile delta; she must have started in the farthest Eastern corner of Egypt. Well, she's on her way now, and she has much bigger issues to consider.

The Nile delta might well have a ruined city, but she's quite sure it's also supposed to have some intact ones. Any of those in sight? She will of course make a wide detour, but one of them ought to be on the shore and visible from some distance off.

(*) A/N: YS does not mention the name of Egypt or Cairo; we will be using our names.

It's nothing but arid marsh as far as the eye can see. There were probably multiple cities here at some point, judging by the number of quarried rocks poking out of the muck and the amount of land that looks like it might've once been drained, but the passage of years and the instability of the ground have slowly dragged them under. The only buildings that rise more than a few feet off the ground are the peaks of sunken pyramids and towers. If Cairo or Alexandria are hereabouts, they're not close enough for Tanya to see them or get pinged by ground radar. She can pass the entire delta without incident.

This is honestly weird and confusing, and Tanya really doesn't need any more confusion in her life right now. She can't think of anywhere else in the world that would has a desert with a northern seashore, a large river delta, and Pharaonic statues and pyramids. ...sunken pyramids? 

...if she sees any more people she'll stop to ask them where she is again, but for now all she can do is keep flying west along the shore.

After another twenty minutes of flight is the first actual city she's encountered since arriving, though it's detectable well before then from the number of magical signatures active within it. A series of massive terraces ornamented with gardens and buildings descends gracefully into a harbor filled with three-masted sailing ships, each of which is roughly as magical as the barges Tanya encountered earlier. One of the ships is in the process of leaving the harbor eastbound. There are no roads, railways, or other obvious ways to enter or leave this city without flying or sailing, nor is there any outlying farmland. It's just a city built into a steep, mountainous shore near an exceptionally good-looking natural harbor.

There continues to be an eerie level of radio silence, despite all the people going about their lives eight thousand feet below her.

This city is sort of taking up Alexandria's place on the map, even if it has cliffs instead of delta lowlands.

There are many excellent reasons it can't be Alexandria, except they're all also reasons it can't be any other city either. Alexandria should have a radio station! And steamships and railways!

Even more troubling is the fact that Tanya doesn't recognize any of these magical signatures. She's far from being an expert on industrial uses of magic but her orb does have civilian spells cataloged, to distinguish them from military ones (and to enable targeting factories). Egypt is ruled by the Commonwealth and there would surely be some commonality. Whatever this is, it doesn't feel - natural. And an aerial mage learns to trusts their instincts about unfamiliar magical signatures.

She won't approach this city which is full of unfamiliar magic. But once it's out of sight, if she can spot a ship that doesn't have detectable magic on it, she'll try approaching it. (Who stations mages on sailhips? Someone who doesn't even have steam paddlers, apparently!) Even a local cargo hauler left over from the sailship era will have maps. 

If all the ships are magical, she supposes she'll just keep flying. The coast from the eastern corner of the sea to Turus is less than three thousand kilometers, and she'll see places she's actually been long before then. Any minute now, in fact?

Every ship larger than a dinghy reads as magical. All of them have one active spell in common; the remainder are subtly different from ship to ship. If she watches carefully, Tanya might notice them occasionally wink out, only to replaced just moments later.

Following the city which is probably not Alexandria is an enormous stretch of inhospitable terrain. Nobody could possibly live here if they tried – the ground is exposed bedrock that rises and falls jaggedly before plunging into the sea, too steep to retain soil and too uneven to build roads over. Farther inland is yet more featureless desert.

Even more inexplicably, this place is also bursting with mage activity. There's at least one active magical effect every few kilometers, sometimes two or three emanating from the same location. Most are either below the ground, inside caves, under overhangs, or otherwise obscured from view, but others are on the surface or over the water and correspond to something that is just barely visible from a great height. They look like tiny glimmering dots.

Is this a secret Commonwealth project? There wouldn't normally be any Imperial mages here. (But that doesn't explain the weird ships...)

Can she see anything useful if she zooms on the various magical signatures with a 1000x magnification lens? Without going anywhere near them herself, of course.

The ones visible above ground tend to be people crossing the desert on foot. They wear similar clothes as the men and women who live in the oasis, traveling in groups of three to six humans and one or two camels. Most of them aren't following any visible path, nor are they drawing wagons, but in every group there's at least one leading the way with a curved sword already drawn.

Over the water, the magical signature nearest Tanya is emanating from another massive winged lizard. It's clearly not the same species as the first one – the scales are the color of reflective brass rather than any natural pigment, it's quite a bit smaller, and the horns are arranged differently – but it might be of the same genus. How many families of hexapodal reptiles can there be? It's also using a spell; the same spell as most of the humans wandering in the desert, in fact, and some of the mages in the city she just passed. If she watches for a moment as it flies low over the ocean it will suddenly dive into the water at speed and emerge a moment later with a mouthful of fish.

This isn't Egypt, is it.

There may be sailships in Alexandria still, but there are also steamships and railways.

People may walk the Sahara with a cooling spell but they bear pistols, not swords.

Magical sea-serpents don't exist. 

Sudden teleports also don't exist. But sudden death is an everyday occurrence.

Being X, you bloody-minded hack. You couldn't even bother to reincarnate me properly this time?

Supposing she is right, what then?

She is stuck in an unfamiliar world, with ubiquitous and unfamiliar magic. She killed someone (something?) the moment she arrived and presumably made some enemies. She doesn't know any local languages, or anything about the political situation. On the upside, she does have her orb and rifle.

...no, if this is another Earth then she probably does speak some local language. That woman recognized the globe and this area's physical geography does match Egypt. She just needs to go to Europe or North America (or Japan). 

It feels wrong that a (provisional) total change in perspective doesn't actually change her immediate plans, but she can't think of a better option. In any case, best to stay away from the country where she participated in a firefight.

She will continue on her way, but be even more paranoid about not approaching any magical signatures. At least now she doesn't have a reason not to cross from Turus into Ildoa; maybe people will speak something intelligible there.

At first it looked like there were two casualties, which is an astoundingly fortunate death toll for a team defending against an attacking dragon. There is a sense in which the target itself was responsible for this outcome, but their contract only requires them to drive it off by any means necessary – the bounty from its death is just the cherry on top. All that's left is for the pharaoh to offer a below-market Raise Dead or two and it will have gone more smoothly than he could've possibly imagined.

That assessment changed once the gas dissipated and the rest of the bodies appeared. Nazir doesn't recognize any of them from experience or descriptions he's heard, but Hurayra is adamant that the furry corpses are agathions, and the piles of homogeneous meat could be chaos beasts if they could've been anything at all. The bodies are still there five minutes later when the last of the raiders have been chased off and the dragon's body has been secured, which means they were not summoned but called.

In addition to this fiasco being responsible for an unknown number of true final deaths, it raises questions about the one that got away. If the creature that killed the dragon was called to Golarion, it could have instructions beyond defending the tower that required it to leave. Perhaps it has been ordered to go somewhere else on some unrelated errand. It might need to go there quite urgently, or it might be of a disposition to fly with lightning speed at all time. It could've killed the dragon simply for standing in its way. They don't know what alignment it has.

Ideally they would inspect the trap to find the answers to their questions, but what remains of it is currently shielded by multiple feet of stone that is both emitting green smoke and slowly developing a thick layer of ice. Their hazard pay is good but not that good. Nazir's wizards get into a heated argument over how long the calling could theoretically last, with possibilities ranging from 'six seconds' to 'indefinitely'. This interval does not fill anyone with confidence.

Before they jump to conclusions, Nazir would like to know if the called monster could conceivably be looking for its payment before it goes home. Is that within the realm of possibility?

 No.

 Yes.

 No.

 Definitely not, that's how Planar Ally works but not Planar Binding, and anyways you have to pay up front.

 That can't be true! How else could there be so many legends about great wizards calling genies and demons to do their bidding only to swindle them afterwards?

 They have to agree first, that's when you trick them, and the spell enforces the bargain. It's why all the legends about wizards swindling genies and demons into doing their bidding are cautionary tales.

 Planar Ally could potentially work that way, but wizards can't prepare those spells so why even bring it up?

 Well, maybe she's one of those Nethysian clerics who call themselves wizards!

The debate continues for several minutes without producing enlightenment, and eventually everyone with Detect Magic prepared is distracted by the lure of the smoking wizard tower and picks a spot that any normal person would think too close in order to observe. Nazir and his lieutenants mull over the information they have, conscious of the fact that the clock is ticking.

The only thing they can agree on is that they don't have enough information. They don't know if it's an elemental, outsider, or something else. They don't know where it went or why. They don't know if they can leave it be or if it needs to be Banished before it's too late.

The first order of business is therefore to try and land Scrying on it. They don't have any professional diviners to hand, but Hurayra has one prepared and was looking in the right direction to see the target on the way out, and between them can easily conjure enough water for a scrying pool. Everyone with even a scrap of relevant experience will watch carefully, and as soon as the spell connects, Faris will send a Message asking whether it's looking for its money before it gets out of the sensor's range. Everyone else will get a good look at it from close range, and between them they might be able to figure out what they're dealing with.

It's not an amazing plan, but no one else has a better one, so it's the one they go with. Can anyone figure out what their mysterious dragon-killer is?

It appears to be a humanoid, possibly a small human woman or even a child. Pale skin, blonde hair, blue eyes. However, appearances can be deceiving.

It is dressed in a green jacket and pants, a round helmet that doesn't cover its face and a pair of large goggles. It is carrying a large pack over its shoulders and holding something in both hands. (The well-traveled among them may identify a distant family resemblance to the musket featured on the flag of Alkenstar, if it were cut in half and the missing barrel added as a second handle underneath.)

It will immediately become clear that the target is still flying at ludicrous speed, as it leaves the range of the Scrying in a tiny fraction of a round. (One-seventieth of a second, if they have a way of measuring this.) The Message lands, but there is no reply.

About half a second later, they will see and hear a series of explosions similar to those that killed Ymohrglas.

The target does not return to within range of the Scrying while it lasts.