Huh, that's funny.

The scintillating corona of lightning and blue-violet light above her is going away awfully quickly, and a brownish grassy mountain slope is approaching from below with perhaps surprising speed.

Also, there's a naked foxgirl dancing down there-

-Wait, no, she's no longer visible. Or was it a trick of the light in the confusion of falling? Who's to say if that blur in the side of her vision in the moonlight rimed with portal-light was anything at all?

"Gah!"

She pulls a broomstick from nowhere and begins to decelerate about as hard as someone trying to get up to speed on a bicycle; whether that will prove to be enough deceleration to negate her interaction with the ground is a matter for the laws of physics.

Amara would normally be able to feel an unknown magic in her surroundings — but right now her metaphysical senses are still ringing from the cross-dimensional jump, and the fox girl passes unnoticed.

She started pretty high up. She can come to a hover before the ground makes its opinion known.

This place is a curious mountain- It's one singular massive slab of a slope, like some titan took a plain and tilted it thirty degrees, very little loose debris or breakage. It's night, and as the portal tears itself apart above her, she can see that it's a full moon. Not Luna. It's white, and about the right size, but the crater patterns are definitely different.

(A thoroughly invisible'd inaudible'd etc'd kitsune pads closer to her as she gets her bearings, to observe.)

On the one hand: Eeeeeeee alien moon! On the other hand, where the heck is the rest of her team.

Amara settles gently to the ground, vanishing her broomstick back to wherever it came from. She stands a bit less than 7 feet tall with a statuesque build that is somehow not diminished by the fact that the right side of her face, that shoulder and arm up to the elbow, most of her hip and all of her legs are apparently made out of water. A small blue aquamarine stone floats where her right eye should be. The non-water part of her features a fairly ordinary appearance, freckles, and bright red hair.

The first thing she does, on landing, is try to send to the exploration coordinator on duty.

[Jamie, I think I landed somewhere away from the rest of the team. Mountain, forest, no visible structures or people, nighttime. Currently safe; going to attempt return.]

... and the message bounces. It's not impossible that Jamie is just really busy, theoretically. But Amara has a bad feeling.

She double-taps the crystal mounted in her armband, which is supposed to send her snapping back home using the arcane connection it maintains. Instead, the crystal makes a sad chirping noise and crumbles to dust.

"Damn it," she curses, and any secretly eavesdropping foxes will find the words come out in their native language.

She doesn't smell evil! Always a good sign. But she's... Odd. Hmm...

...Eh, fuckit.

"Hey!" an illusion opposite of where she actually is calls up. "Isekai?"

Amara whips her head around to look at the illusion.

"Woah! Sorry, I didn't see you there. And — not in the way you probably mean it, I think? I'm with the Seekers, a group of peaceful multiversal explorers on a mission to discover new worlds and set up trade relations and means of transport between them. I was supposed to arrive here with my team, but nobody is answering my comms and I'm not sure why."

Surreptitiously, a pouch on her belt flips itself open and a handful of wildflower seeds drift out and fall to the ground, just in case.

"Yeah, I was invisible! Okay, wow. Usually we just get people from Earths. Well, even those are pretty rare. And you arrived right on top of me instead of anywhere else, I suspect shenanigans. What are the seeds for?"

Does she need to burn them? No no, no being paranoid, you already decided to trust.

Damn, she thought she was subtler than that.

"I am from Earth, actually! I went to MIT before my magical powers were awoken," she clarifies. "But if this world is some sort of known hub that pulls travelers in, that might explain how I ended up here. And I sort of don't want to explain what the seeds are for, because they're mostly useful in case someone attacks me. I will say that they're perfectly normal non-magical wildflowers that will not harm anyone and have no special properties."

This is technically true — it is the act of planting them that has special properties, not the seeds themselves.

"I'm Amara, by the way!"

"Wow, you know, I barely remember Earth? I'm Weiss. Welcome to Tirra."

"Thanks!"

Amara runs through her mental checklist to make sure she hasn't forgotten any of the abnormal arrival procedures, but with her return crystal gone most of them don't apply.

"How long have you been on Tirra? What's it like?"

Weiss might have just been here long enough to forget the normal way ... or the planet that apparently pulls people in sometimes might be trying to pull a Piranesi. Better to check.

"It's kinda fucked in some ways, but the safe zones are nice. They're like... Kinda late medieval early renaissance but with lots of magic going around? I've been here for... A while... And things are definitely getting better on that front."

Her illusion shifts, wearing her usual light wilderness tunic-and-pants-thing- It's still not her, but she's carefully padding over to join it and end the ruse.

"...I wasn't a proper isekai, I was a reincarnation, I think. Goddess Tamamo made me a kitsune. I think it's been probably about a century? Maybe more? I - it's like, Earth almost doesn't feel that real anymore, you know? It's some distant dream. ...I wasn't in a great place psychologically for a while and stopped keeping track of time."

Well, that really doesn't do much to confirm either hypothesis.

"Oof. I'm sorry to hear that. What are the safe zones safe ... from? Monsters?"

There has been a surprising quantity of monsters in her life since her awakening.

"Monsters! And general cursed energy that does bad stuff."

Amara nods.

"Right. I'm not really equipped for general cursed energy, although I might be partially immune. Tricky to test safely. Monsters are a good deal more manageable."

She looks around at the clearing where her away team isn't, and bounces one more volley of unanswered sends off of the mental void where they ought to be. When separated from a group, it is often easiest to be found by remaining in one place. On the other hand, she can't spend her whole life standing around in forests, and if they end up getting a high-level divination practitioner after her moving around a bit won't throw them off.

She bends down and presses a firm handprint into the soil with as much weight and minor telekinesis as she can bring to bear, and then stands up again.

"Are we in a safe zone right now? If not, how on guard should I be?"

"It's sort of a spectrum. This place is more Marches- It's like, two thirds cursed? Not one of the really bad zones either. I hang out way out here when I need space and I'm in the area- That mountain is called Windslab. It's fun to make a sail-sled and ride the wind up, then jump off the top and wingsuit glide... I do that with illusions, it's a kitsune thing, illusions just real enough to have physical presence... Wow, this is weird. I wouldn't have predicted I'd be this calm about an otherworlder. Um. Be at least a little on guard but I'm a match for anything around here. Curses look blackish, tar-ish, and generally evil. Undead look dead. Magic animals look like animals and you should leave them alone unless they get aggressive first, spirits are insubstantial and same, if you see anything really creepy and weird it might be a Cryptid and those are - very very nasty, because they are intelligent and have unpredictable idiosyncratic powers, buuuut they are also extremely rare. Like, I've fought... Six in the last century and some and I actively hunt them down with a party if I hear about them. If we do need to escape, I can shift us both to the spirit world if you touch me. It's not a guarantee against a Cryptid but, you know, better than not even trying."

"Don't bother animals or spirits unless they attack; local monsters follow genre conventions for evil appearances. Got it."

She debates internally for a moment, but it really is information that anyone who might fight monsters beside her should know.

"If we do get ambushed by a Cryptid, I'm happy to go explore the spirit world, but don't put yourself at risk trying to save me. I'm a lot tougher to permanently kill than I look. If my corpse is recoverable, please toss it into salt water, but if it isn't that's not a problem."

"Oh! That's a relief. Uh- Kitsunes will reform in the spirit world. Eventually."

"Most other people here will go to the Great Wheel of Reincarnation, though, and be reborn without much memory, some other time and place. Uh- Give last rites of some kind if you can, if it comes up. The exact ritual doesn't matter so much as long as it is genuine and respectful."

"Alright, I can do that," she agrees. "It sounds like we don't have much to worry about from monsters, then, the pair of us. Do you spend a lot of time hunting them on behalf of the less durable people?"

"Yeah! Or, um... It's a lot cleaner than trying to intervene in conflicts between people. And curse monsters are nicely unambiguously nonsentient and evil. Very satisfying to burn. It's not like I do it twenty four seven, I burned the fuck out doing that kind of thing early on, but... Yeah. You said you're an explorer?"

"Mmhm! Back on Earth before I found out about magic, I thought that the only place left to really explore was the ocean, so I went for the next best thing and studied biochem, because there's also a lot of cool stuff to be discovered there. But then when I found out magic was real, I heard about the Seekers and their whole to-boldly-go thing, and I signed up right away."

She gives a slight wince.

"This was actually my first proper mission, so I haven't exactly been doing things for long, but I did do a bunch of touring around the Union of Worlds during my training. There are some really amazing people and places out there."

"Dang. That sucks. I got hit by truck-kun. Not doing something heroic, like the usual isekai trope, just... Wham."

Sigh.

"...So, travel wise, occasionally 'rifts' open here. The gods are silent on the subject of isekai travel, they won't help or tell you about them, I'm not sure why. But you can go through if you find one. And kitsunes can do a... Dream journey sort of thing that I call 'the long road home' to travel 'home'. So I've actually been in a few other worlds besides Earth and here."

Blink.

"Wait, what year is it on Earth now? Or is there more than one maybe?"