Maybe intentionally trying to mess with interdimensional portals was a bad idea, Akira thought just before she was pulled in. Well, at least she wasn't bored anymore.
She lands in... Probably this is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, what with all the ruined buildings slouching against each other, the moaning wind heavy with sand (that's covering the ground and some of the ruined buildings), the very aesthetic rusted playground...
It's quiet, except for the wind and the rustle of sand. At least at first.
She finds:
• A collection of assorted robots (metal a dark brown interrupted by corrosion and old scratches), in various states of 'blown up'
• Not all of whom are entirely dead
• And one of whom is being apparently vivisected by a smiling humanoid.
"Stop screeching so much, I didn't blow up your core," she informs the screaming robot as she starts hooking up wires from a device of some kind to assorted points in its chest cavity. "Though if you want to like complain I need more data on speech..."
"Stooop!" one of the other not entirely dead robots wails.
"There we go!" chirps the possibly insane humanoid. "Great data, keep going."
"You know plenty of people have tried nobody has ever succeeded. When someone hits me enough I just disappear and reappear a while later. Come to think of it I don't know what will happen if I disappear here. Will I show up back home or will I show up again here? Interesting question... I'm not eager to test it though because home is boring at the moment."
"Hmmm, good point... I might have to put you through other tests first! Though do you know what the threshold is for 'hits you enough?' I might be able to get some good data before hitting that. Like this guy," she steps on the vivisected robot currently trying to crawl away from her, "Isn't dead yet."
Seems to be! She's got a couple of small machines she records things with or hooks up to the robots, and after she finishes off the two living ones she goes and grabs a pickup truck. She drives it right up to the edge of the killing field and starts putting assorted robot parts on it, in between all the analysis.
"Been outright off planet a couple times. Been to the Kingdom of Night and even properly into the Kingdom of Day - we're in Twilight now, which is where I'd recommend staying - and I've only been in this region for what, thirty years? At least this most recent stretch..." Shrug. "A lot happens here, so I swing through pretty often even when I'm mostly elsewhere."
(She's speaking casually, lightly, like it's all one big joke... But Akira gets an odd sense of being watched from her.)
"We've been making progress in the war..." she says, staring ahead as she whips the truck between buildings, along long-destroyed roads. "But the enemy's making progress, too. Hard to tell who's advancing faster, sometimes." And, under her breath: "Or who's losing slowest."
They break out of the group of buildings, into a wide sandy stretch. There's a cliff with a tunnel ahead of them, but no way they're getting the truck up that...
So Jackass turns and heads for a narrow crack in the rock. "We'll start picking up speed a little bit from here," she says, hitting the accelerator. "You know we've got units now that could outrun this truck? Could just jump up that cliff, too. And they wouldn't get too overheated, though they'd have trouble hauling all this back..." Heavy sigh. "And now we're starting to see enemy units that none of the rest of us relics can keep up with."
Akira is quiet for a time... it's clear that her casual approach to things is bothering her companion. "I'm sorry if I'm being too casual... I'm not used to things mattering... Where I come from it's pretty easy to fix any mistakes you make. I don't think I was quite internalizing how it seems like that's less the case here."
"...You're fine with me. I'm usually pretty casual." She sends a grin Akira's way, her posture relaxing. "Stuff's permanent here for most people - usually not for YoRHa, the new units, though they'll get pissy if you make them 'waste resources' because you talked one of their units into participating in some research..."
"Not really, most of my exotic senses were from being tied into how things worked back home. With some work I might be able to calibrate my entity detector but it won't be able to tell me what things are if I don't tell it first and I don't think durability here is enough like home to repurpose my senses for that."
"Heh, nah, showy's common. My original build was for intel stuff though, and intel work nowadays is sneakier - I've upgraded and all, but I still prefer not letting my enemy shoot back. Though if you can play the tank, go right ahead." She shoots another machine. "I'm one of the best snipers you'll meet though, and my equipment's top of the line - this gun doesn't look like much, but I'm swapping between nano-tip, explosive, EMP, corrosion, and energy rounds. Which the fanciest dedicated gun units usually have like, one of bullets or energy rounds and only one or two special attacks - you're doing about normal gun damage."
"Most of it has to do with their armor - even a pretty cheap machine gun can pulverize un-reinforced concrete and, like, trees. The armor's harder against sudden point pressure, but weaker against sustained and sliding pressure. And against being blown up! And shockwaves work a lot better than bullets, but - man, if you want to see what weapons can really do, I should drag one of those YoRHa out here. 13B's one of their highest end units, and she's got a sword that'll slice a goliath spider in half. A shockwave won't do much more than dent a goliath's main body; I'd usually just blow up their limbs and then wedge them somewhere so they can't angrily roll at me - but a shockwave from a sword like hers is plenty enough to kill multiple of these little guys in one swing."
"Huh, so armor is much more important here. I don't think a lot of my more dangerous weapons are safe to use from inside a car. Maybe this." She appears a rather large pink sword and flicks the tip in the direction of the enemies. There's a sound of a meow and a small cat trailing rainbows is launched towards the enemies at a speed much slower than bullets occasionally bouncing off the ground and releasing a sparkling explosion when it does. This is considerably more effective.
"Best we can tell - though a lot of archives are fucked - this planet didn't have magic like, ten thousand years ago? Magic was introduced when two beings came over from another world, and it's still pretty rare - we don't know a ton of things about that other world but for whatever reason we've settled on calling it 'the old world.'"