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.

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?