And there are air currents that are active and moving, more than you'd normally get. The ground beneath her feet is very damp, and the ceiling is low and - when she stretches out a hand - propped up with wooden beams. There's moving air, but not much light, though she can vaguely hear people not that far off.

--right, there's a gold mine around here. 

She blows her whistle and heads towards the people.

PEOPLE! Over there!

In the light of her headlamp, they are mostly male, very short (men and women both), ill-clothed, and kind of scrawny, blinking at her helmet's blinding light. They have picks and crowbars which they were clearly using on the walls of the mine, and in the cramped confines of the mine, mostly need to move on hands and knees even though they're shorter than she is. They look kind of shocked to see her! Elements that may be contributing include (a) huge, (b) lantern on her head, (c) all the stuff she's carrying, and (d) there was a blank wall around that corner five minutes ago!

There's light vaguely off thataways, in the direction the air is coming from.

"Compassion and acceptance [desire], soulbearers," she greets them politely, "do you need help?"

They are now looking MORE confused.

"[Informal expression of confusion], [request for identification], [rude and emphatic request for confusion to be resolved regarding physical location]!*"

"[Hesitant but respectful term of gendered address].**"

(*: lit: "Huh? Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?")

(**: lit: "uh, ma'am".)

"I'm a caver [personal observation]. I got lost and stumbled on your mine. --I don't know a hell of a lot about mining [personal observation] but most miners have more safety equipment than that [trusted source], so I was wondering if you were in trouble somehow [personal observation]."

So she is a Lost Naive Rich Person with a weird pattern of speech, probably a foreigner!

"Let's get you up top." [implication: because it is unsafe here]

"That seems like a good idea [self-evident]."

She follows them up top. 

This requires going on her belly (it would be hands and knees, but she's bigger than they are), past some children doing work by hand, under an extremely low ceiling to get to where there's an airshaft (down which cool air is flowing; there's another airshaft with a big fire under it, to produce circulation) and getting hauled up in a bucket along with a load of coal. The bucket is pumped up by a gigantic creaky machine which she probably does not recognize from museums on Very Early Steam Engines, but is coal-fueled and sending coal smoke and steam everywhere.

At the surface, there's more people (men, women, and children) crushing the coal finer and engaged in various hand-tool-based processing, nearly all of it by muscle power.

...

This is not the Teachingsphere. 

There aren't any barbarians on this continent and even if there were none of them would be able to mine coal, Fortitude is pretty sure. 

Fortitude mentally replays her last conversation.

"What-hsssh is this hsssh-language-hssssh I am hsssh-SPEAKING!"

"Cynring," says one of the women crushing coal in a dealing-with-someone-having-an-emotional-breakdown-or-possibly-hallucinating tone.

(Everyone is giving her very funny looks. It isn't just that she's a giant compared to everyone here, it's the helmet - the lanterns they're using are metal frames with a candle inside, and thin metal or horns with lots of holes in it for a screen more often than glass)

Right, okay. 

She wants to bite herself she wants to go in a corner and scream she wants to-- not productive. She can do that later.

She quickly runs through a few standard prayers: What is true is already so. Because it is true, it is what is there to be interacted with. I can stand what is true because I am already enduring it. The logos would not give me something I can't handle. When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is less likely than a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs. You don't know everything. Give me the virtue I need to handle this, please, I don't know how.*

Then she turns, very conscientious not to use evidentials which this hsssh-language doesn't have. "Hello! I'm sorry if I was confusing, something very strange is going on. Do you have any idea of what is happening?"

She absently notes that none of the plant species are familiar, and that she didn't really expect them to be.

 *Quote from a famous early student of the Teaching, currently considered mythical, when she faced death by torture.   

"You got stuck in a coal mine and couldn't get out?" someone hazards.

Three deep breaths. In for four, hold for four, out for seven. 

"I got lost in a cave near Sankrena, in the Redwood Watershed Area, in the Teachingsphere. This does not look like the Redwood Watershed Area." She curls and relaxes her toes in her boots; it's an easy way to do muscle relaxation that people can't notice. "In the Teachingsphere, we mine more with machines than with humans, and children go to school instead of working; outside of the Teachingsphere, no one has the tech level to mine coal at all, as far as I know. I believe I can show you things in my pack that no one you know has, maybe that you've never heard of, if you don't believe me about the machines. I conclude something very strange happened and I certainly don't know what it is, but since I arrived in your mine maybe you do know."

"... Ed, get the boss." 

When Ed comes back it is with a man who is a little taller than the apparently local average, moderately less grimy, and has a quiet aura of Person Who Should Be Listened To in spite of being male.

He gives her a - surveying look? paying more attention to her helmet and clothes than to what her face looks like.

"You say you got lost in a cave," he says quietly.

It is the 24th century and Fortitude knows perfectly well that men are capable of being in charge of things!

"Yes. My"-- she pauses, what is with this language, and settles on-- "vocation is exploring caves. Well, dangerous parts of nature in general, really."

The aforementioned boss has, in fact, put together a very basic model of the situation, which neatly explains everything except her stuff. Wolcyn is the most advanced country on the globe; it should not be behind anywhere, and yet her lantern is extremely ingenious.

"Please, ma'am, can I ask you to go over your story again in more detail?" Because just because you have a model doesn't mean you stop looking.

"My fiance and I both explore dangerous places as a vocation. We decided to have our wedding together in the first cave I ever explored, and went down there. Everything was normal. We slept at the bottom of the cave. In the morning, I got separated from my husband-- I don't know how, I turned around and he wasn't behind me-- and became horribly lost. I noticed airflow and headed in its direction, and it turned out to be your mine."

"And you said that was in..."

"Mount Wanakun. The nearest city is Sankrena, in the Redwood Watershed Area, in the Teachingsphere." She belatedly realizes that 'Redwood' is translating as 'crimson tree.' "--A redwood is a kind of tree, I don't know if you have them around here. Also, our mines are much much better than yours, we have machines to do things that you're doing by hand."

The idea of using machines instead of hand labor to do work is not, in fact, a completely foreign idea to the foreman; up until recently the only way to drain mines was a bucket chain, but a few years ago some ingenious fellow invented an 'atmospheric engine' that pumps the water out all by itself, and they even have one installed here.

"I have not ever heard of Sankrena or the Teachingsphere," he says. "This is the [state-in-which-the-government-is-a-public-matter] of Wolcyn, on the ridge of Tano, off the [major-landmass] of Eormsele. We do not have crimson trees."

"--And to clarify you do not have people with clothes that look like mine who travel around in caravans and give you injections that keep your children from getting sick, and pills that cure those who are ill, and things in a woman's arm that means that she can have sex without having babies, and stronger tools than you can make on your own, and fertilizer to help your plants grow?"

He looks somewhat offended at 'have sex without having babies', and fails to hide it. "I have never seen anyone with clothes that look like yours," he says, again slowly and carefully to try to avoid miscommunication. "We have vaccination against some poxes, and fertilizer to help plants grow, and the best tools we have are the ones we make."

"...I think I have perhaps traveled from another planet," she says faintly. "Is this... a thing known to happen?"

"Our ancestors came here from another world," he says, in what translates as the sort of wording you would use for possibly ahistorical stories of the Teacher, "brought by angels. - Otherwise no." 

(He is still not putting a very high reliability on this being true, he thinks she's some kind of crazy, but...)

'Angels' translates as the word for some kind of god. This country could be superstitious, although given the givens Fortitude is not ruling out that angels are real here. "May I be taken to the local monks so we can sort this out?"

She may, in fact, notice when she tries to say 'monk' that that word does not translate at all! In any way shape or form! The closest you get is ridiculously long constructed sentences pinning like eight different things together that appear to be completely separate concepts in the language.

She swears in Alexandrite, then says in Wolcynlanguage, "can you take me to the sort of people who deal with this sort of thing?"

"No one deals with this sort of thing," he says. "I can take you to the [representative-of-the-owner-of-the-mine] or the [person-in-the-area-who-owns-the-most-farmland], but the [regionally-elected-member-of-the-legislative-committee] is in the [city-which-is-where-the-main-administration-is] and there are no [UNTRANSLATABLE 2, hereafter "Aces"] in the [small-administrative-division-of-the-state]."

"Then I defer to your judgement, Wise-Leader," Fortitude says politely.

Thaaaat is not normal language.

What he would like to do is take her to a priest, but the available priests are an illiterate parish priest and the local Captain's Steward whose chief religious belief is that the second sons of important landowners deserve cushy sinecures, especially if they're him.

"It think the [person-in-the-area-who-owns-the-most-farmland]*. Ada!"

"Yeah, Boss?"

Ada turns out to be a tough-looking middle-aged woman who was supervising some of the coal-crushing.

"We'll send her off on the next trip. Take care of her and make sure she gets to the [person-in-the-area-who-owns-the-most-farmland], sure?"

(* "Squire.")

(* Still "Squire.")

"It's nice to meet you, Ada-Responsible. Is there a thing I can do to help while we wait? I know medicine and I am a quick learner on routine tasks."

"- Sure," she says. "Take a look at Jack, will you?" She points. "He burned his hand, you know how to stop that going bad?"

How bad is the burn? First-degree, second-degree, third-degree...?

Second-degree burns from atmospheric engine steam! It doesn't look bad, for second-degree burns, except for the part where between coal dust and coal smoke it is basically impossible to get and keep anything clean around this mine.

Pejorative-syllable coal. Okay. 

She undoes her outer clothes, drops them on the ground, and rips a strip of fabric from her shirt. "I need clean water. Is there a river around here somewhere? I also need honey if you have it."

"There's a river, but..." but they use it to carry away the tailings, and it's, uh, not clean at all. They have mildly grimy water that was at one point clean (but has been uncovered around all the coal dust and smoke) and beer and whiskey? Whiskey could help. They know that's a disinfectant. (They do not have honey.)

"...what's whiskey?" (She has put her outer clothes back on and carefully tucked the torn-off part of her shirt into her outer clothes to keep it clean.)

"[Distilled-grain-alcohol]? You drink it."

How many addicts do they have?

But alcohol is a good disinfectant, so she uses it to clean the wound and then very quickly binds the wound with her scrap of clothes before the inside can get too sooty. The whole while she speaks in her firm, calm, and professional disaster-relief voice. 

The firm, professional disaster-relief voice is instinctively obeyed, just like it would be back home.

(... many. many addicts.)

Then she looks around for other tasks that need doing until the next trip.

The next trip isn't that late! The coal is being sent down from the hills where it's mined on a rickety cart that descends on rails, powered by the force of gravity. Ada and another of the miners are keeping a hand on it to make sure it doesn't turn over.

How clever!

Fortitude follows.

The cart stops where there's a river wide enough for barges, to be loaded by Ada and the other miner (and they'll be happy if Fortitude gives them a hand) onto the very large bin in which the barge stores coal!

Fortitude gives them a hand!

She is athletic and has received adequate food since childhood and is probably noticeably stronger than they are. 

Yup! She's taller and has a stronger frame than they are, so it's really not even close.

"Tough," says the other miner, with a somewhat-impressed tone.

"Thank you!"