Михаил blinks at him in confusion for a moment, but returns his bow and watches him walk away. He mumbles a short prayer, and then goes back into the temple.

Sigh. Well, he got soup, and met a kind man, and rested a little. That's good! He tries to feel good about it.

He finds a place out of sight, portals back to his rock (it's as close as anywhere else he has a portal), and starts extending his portals south again.

Passing south takes him over the huge lake, over more mountains, and then into a desert area. After a few hundred more miles, he comes on another city, bigger than the last one, but a bit smaller than the largest one he's seen here so far.

This one has two large roads running across it like an X, and an odd mixture of tall buildings and low urban sprawl.

As he approaches the city, a faint rumbling noise gets progressively louder.

He tries to get portals into the city unobserved, to decide whether to try to talk to people here. What's this weird noise? Is it going to make it difficult to overhear people?

Well, whatever it is, it gets quieter when he drops down into the city itself. The people here are speaking a mix of languages -- one that sounds a bit like the last place he stopped, and another one that he doesn't recognize.

Ahmose has the sinking feeling that he's going to go through the gestures of trying to make himself understood, without any real hope, and fail and feel terrible about it afterwards, and now he's feeling terrible about it beforehand in anticipation, which is not an improvement.

Sigh. Probably a few hundred miles aren't enough to help. He'll keep on going south, and try to occupy himself by remembering the taste of the soup.

He's not far out of the city when a larger-than-person sized suit of metallic silver armor — styled after a dragon, but clearly made of metal — shoots past his portal and points a hand at him.

It says something unintelligible in the local language in a loud voice.

Aaaah is that a local Authority is he doing something illegal??

Ahmose doesn't close the portal, though he comes close in the first moment. He will talk through it and explain apologetically he does not understand, in as many as several languages. If they do want him to close the portal he will feel very bad about not understanding that right away, but if they want something else it would be rude to just close it.

He really really hopes they're not - hostile, because he is abstractly aware that the world is a big and strange place and some people are not nice or law-abiding or even honest, and some of them even set dog-monstrosities on people in public squares. But his wariness is not enough to immediately override his politeness/awkwardness instinct. He can close the portal with a thought, hopefully that will be enough?

She comes to a stop in front of the portal, and peers through it. Unfortunately, she has to speak a bit loudly over her thrusters, but she does her best to adopt a gentle tone, when she realizes how flustered he is.

She listens to each of his languages, shaking her head after each one. And then she unfolds a small black object from some compartment inside her armor, and holds it out to him, although her flight isn't quite stable enough to put it through an eye-sized portal.

Um. Why does she (it sounds like a she) want him to take it? Because it might do something to him, or - because it would let her find him through it? He can't think of any other options, which of course doesn't prove anything.

Does he trust a stranger to maybe cast a spell on him? In her favor: she asked nicely. Against it: didn't anyone teach you not to accept magic items from mysterious flying women?

He'll temporize and open another, bigger portal so she can drop it through without him touching it.

She finds that acceptable. She drops the object through the portal, and then backs away and drops down to land her suit on the Mongolian steppe.

The squarish black object lights up where it lies on the ground near him, the surface changing to show an image of a fairly average looking woman.

She says something in the same voice as the flying suit, only this time without having to shout over the thrusters. Then she puts a hand to her chest and says "Dragon", before looking at him inquisitively.

Oh, it's like a scrying mirror. He's never seen one, but he thinks it could be an ordinary cheap mirror and not a priceless artifact entrusted to him he'd like to stop thinking about that now please.

This is - more promising than the man who gave him soup, really! Someone with flying armor, and a means of tracking down his portal (unless she just got lucky? no, she had the mirror prepared), and just magic in general, is much more likely to be able to help him.

Which leaves just one question, really. If she wants to talk to him, why not just cast tongues? Isn't that about as cheap as scrying or sending? He's very puzzled, but he's willing to talk to her; hopefully she has something in mind.

He points to himself. "Ahmose," he enunciates clearly (good thing he's had practice!).

She smiles at him, with a perfectly normal number of human teeth. It was surprisingly difficult to get that right when she was putting her avatar together, for some reason.

She switches the phone to show a little cartoon animation. It shows a cartoon version of him and of her avatar emitting speech bubbles with different symbols in them. His are swirly and curving and hers are sharp and geometrical.

Then it shows a him talking to the phone. A fox shows up on the screen, and then his character emits a speech bubble with a fox in it. This repeats with a few different objects, while the cartoon version of her avatar listens.

Finally, the animation shows her speaking swirly curving symbols to him, and him speaking them back.

He's even more mystified why someone who can cast remote illusions can't also cast tongues (and doesn't speak any of his languages in the first place)!

Actually, he'll just try to ask. He sticks out his tongue, points to it, and then to the woman, and tries to mime questioning.

She looks at him in confusion.

Then she demonstratively sticks out her own tongue and points at it, to reassure him that she has  a tongue too.

... which really does justify the time that went into fully modelling it. At the time, she was just being a perfectionist and not thinking about Colin, but in a world of strange capes, preparing for unlikely possibilities really does pay off.

Is the tongues spell maybe called something else in other languages - oh! Whatever language she speaks probably has different words for, well, language and tongue.

This resolves a little bit of his confusion but not, really, why she wouldn't use a translation spell however named. But he can't immediately think of another way to mime it, so he'll go along with the illusion-charades she proposes for now.

He'll name the things she shows him images of. In Taldane, because more people know Taldane than Osirian and he's almost as fluent in it.

It's a somewhat tedious and extended process. She has an adaptive heuristic algorithm that seeks out common morphological derivations and etymologically related words in order to build out vocabulary faster, though, so it is really marvelously fast compared to learning a language the slow way.

After a little bit, the cartoons get more complex, and she extracts basic grammar. And then, finally, she can address him in broken Taldane.

"Hello! Good is to meet you," she tells him. "Is it okay: I send a person to bring you to a government building? With food. And warm."

If she can understand him that well, then surely he can make himself understood?

"I want to go home. To Osirion, in Garund. Do you know where that is?"

She shakes her head.

"I never heard of Osirion," she tells him. "Or Garund."

She shows him a picture of a stylized cauldron.

"Do you have a mark like this on you?" she asks. "Sometimes, people are here and not knowing how and having a mark."

"No? Unless I don't know I do? That would be very weird. And I do know how I got here! Through a portal, like that one. But I had to let it close."

He'll try to draw a little map of the continents in the dirt. Surely the continents can be identified just from their relative locations.

She did not build her phone with a side-facing camera, unfortunately.

"You turn the phone to see, please?" she requests.

Alright, it's reasonably clearly not a trap that will cast a spell on him when he touches it. She could have done that any number of ways by now if she'd wanted to attack him. Although he could make a portal to show her his map without moving her device - no, focus.

She peers at the map. Then she shows a map of the world.

"I think you are from a different planet," she comments. "I don't think I able send you home now. You come to government building, my different artificer looks at your portals, maybe we able send you home."

Oh no he's been so stupid!!

Being on a different planet explains everything so well. The different languages and continents and everything. He opened a planar portal without knowing how to target it, what was he thinking?

Actually - what about the gods? They might have different names and symbols, but can he maybe a get a description across? Presumably if he can't make the portals work reliably the next step will be to buy plane shifts home, so...

"That explains it! I couldn't find any familiar temples. What do you call the god of commerce and cities and travel? We call Him Abadar, he has the symbol of the golden key and the Golden Arches" - he demonstrates.

Dragon adopts a sympathetic look.

"We don't have gods," she tells him. "Only people. Sometimes, people tell other people they are gods, but they are not."