Instead there's a mountainside.

She's standing on a rocky outcropping maybe two dozen paces across in all directions, overlooking a valley in front of her. She has a good view of the valley below and the rising hills then steep peaks of another mountain range opposite the one she's standing on. Around her are trees, a mix of deciduous and evergreen that cover the slopes. Behind her are more trees, and it looks like they go up a ways but not that far, she can see the bare mountaintop in that direction where the trees peter out and then stop entirely. In that direction, on either side of the rocky outcrop, is something that could maybe be called a trail if one was inclined to be very generous. That trail moves perpendicular to the slope. It really doesn't look like much.

It's beautiful here, if one is inclined to appreciate mountain taiga. The trees are beginning to bloom into colour. The sky above is a heartbreakingly clear blue, with picturesque clouds floating in it. The air is clear and sharp and unpolluted. 

It's also cold. Not very cold, not yet, or maybe not depending on your personal definition of cold, but she can see a bit of her breath fogging the air and if she isn't insulated against the wind then it's going to start sucking the warmth out of her really fast up here.

Her outfit's fabric itself isn't terrible in terms of heat retention, but none of it was used in the production of sleeves.  She unties her outer wrap and rotates it to use as a shawl - or rather she stares out at the vista for a solid few moments and then does that.  Once she's got the wrap into a configuration that leaves most of her skin covered, between it and her leggings and tunic, she . . . hm.  It really is quite a view.

She'll start running down the maybe-a-trail, in whichever direction looks the least dubious.

After running for a minute or two, it looks more and more like this is a real trail. There's a consistent path through the trees, sometimes with stone water bars. It's not a well kept trail. The underbrush has had time to reach over where she's walking, and while none of it is thorny it is enough to whip at her if she's running at a fast pace. Still, within the shelter of the trees at least the only wind she has to deal with is what she creates by her own speed. She sees a few small animals scurry away from her passage to find shelter in trees or burrows. One is a mammal about twice the size of her fist with a huge tail, another is a bright blue bird of some kind.

How long can she run? It's generally (though not always) lightly downhill, firm ground if not perfectly even.

Normally she can run indefinitely but with no one else around that's a much more open question!  Apparently still a pretty decent while, although her speed drops sharply after less than a minute and again after another few.  But she can at least keep up enough of a jog to stay somewhat warm.

Hm.  Seeing an unfamiliar mammal and then a very familiar jay seems much stranger than if they were both familiar or both un-, though she supposes she might not actually know that much about what animals there are in different parts of the world.  The trees . . . are also not something she's remotely knowledgeable enough about to be useful, hm.

The thought of whether there are any other humans here at all, wherever this is, isn't any more productive a line of reasoning than wondering whether there are some fairly close to her, but that's very worth worrying over.  Any signs pointing to this trail having been built by or at least used by humans?

Depending on her woods lore. Any real trail knowledge will tell her that the water bars (stone slabs usually a couple handspans tall and a pace or two long, set into the dirt to keep water from running endlessly down the trail and eroding it) are deliberately built by something with either intelligence or unusual instincts. It doesn't rule out something as complicated as a beaver dam, but it would be a strong guess at something smart. This is just a really unnatural way for stones to get placed in a trail.

If she's better, she might notice the tufts of hair on some bushes and scratch marks on some trees. Humans, if they're around, are not the only large animals in the neighborhood. At that skill level she'll probably notice the clearing on her right would make a passable camp site, if she had any materials whatsoever to camp with. It's not exactly well kept, but there's a circle of bare earth where the undergrowth has been deterred by something.

If she's really good and has very good eyesight, she might notice the tops of a few branches some distance away from that clearing of bare earth show signs of something rubbing them and dislodging some strips, as though a rope was slung over it and then used to hoist something up to hang. That's kind of hard and unrealistic, for most people.

Zarian is not among the fraction of Cretari citizens who've never even left their city but her camping knowledge is still next to non-existent.  She picked up relevant expertise on two separate occasions and never used any of it and has forgotten all of it, or at least can't drag any of it to mind at the moment.  She can likely light a fire if it comes to that; she remembers what a handful of poisonous plants look like; she has absolutely no idea what rocks are supposed to look like if left untouched.  Probably not like this?  Probably not like this.

Her eyesight is keen enough, generically, to catch the tufts of fur, which are either very alarming or maybe just from the fluffy-tails or something climbing around in odd places.

She pauses only long enough to put her wrap back properly on, in case she abruptly needs her hands for anything, and then continues at her previous nervous jog.

More trees.

More trail.

More cold, and the sun is starting to slide towards the horizon.

More tufts of alarming fur.

And-

Two people coming up the trail in towards Zarian, both carrying large packs and moving slower than she is. One of them is dressed in a range of bright blue, wearing what looks like a helmet without the top, letting a cascade of nut brown hair fall behind them. They're otherwise dressed in a light jacket of different blues, made with what looks like mesh at the sides of the torso, and an array of straps and holsters binding small packages to the sides of their indigo pants. They're in the lead, chatting animatedly in a language that sounds like it's made out of rubber and bendy straws, pitch sliding up and down as they speak.

The other one has a black hat with a straight, hard brim sticking forward. A length of black cloth covers their lower face, and a pair of tinted glasses cover their eyes. The rest of their clothes are nondescript black, not the pitch black that stands out but a kind of dull, worn black. They seem to be bundled in layers, with half of those layers now hanging from hooks on their pack or tied about their waist. Their jacket and the sides of their pants bulge with zippered pockets, and their hands are covered in black gloves with some kind of grip sewn into the palms and fingers. There are a few decals stitched to the shoulder of their jacket.

This one is mostly listening and scanning their surroundings, which is why they notice Zarian first and gives her a nod of acknowledgment.

PEOPLE.  Zarian has never been so happy to see non-specific people before.  - They are people, right?  Yes, good; she'll take the body heat and lack of exertion from whichever of them is better along each of those axes assuming they have respectively more and less of those than she does.

The one in blue is a little less exerted, but both of them have been pushing themselves and their legs have the kind of deep tiredness that you get when your muscles have been just shy of screaming for the last few hours and you've slowed your pace only to what you had to in order to be able to keep moving. It's possibly apparent that their speed is faster than comfortable for either of them. Their packs are well made to distribute the load around their shoulders and hips, but there's still some soreness in the upper body.

They both run hot, and their clothes are designed (among other things) to vent heat. Depending on citrilian norms, these two might be just under feverish. They're certainly radiating body heat to spare.

What else can Zarian pick up about them, while she's in range? Both strangers have noticed her now, and the one in blue just gave a cheerful motion somewhere between a wave and a salute. Neither seems aware anything is amiss.

In that case Zarian'll take the heat but not the exertion.  It's in some ways less comfortable since the difference between her body temperature and the air is a lot more extreme, now, but she'll definitely take it (and keep on taking it at frequent intervals).

She repeats the gesture and starts picking up the language.  Presumably these people have other traits but those aren't her immediate focus.

This person has a language that makes no sense.

It has a short word for "semantic change." Three of them, actually, distinguishing between unintentional drift, deliberate attempts to change it for the better, and mischievous alterations as an attempt at sowing confusion. Two of those words were used in the conversation these two are having, or rather in the monologue the one in blue is giving to the one in black. It doesn't seem like it's a conversation about the language specifically either, from what Zarian is picking up it's a story about someone's day and an amusing anecdote about standing in line for too long at a sandwich shop. Despite having a word for semantic change, there appears to be no word for sandwich and the one in blue has to use a kind of punning neologism involving the root word for bread, the word for "conjunction" used in a place it grammatically shouldn't be, and the word for zeugmas. What kind of language has more words for parts of speech than it does for common food items?

Oh. That isn't their main language, Zarian can pull a lot of it from the one in blue but the one in black is barely understanding the monologue. Green is trying to teach it to black. If Zarian can pick up languages they aren't currently speaking in she'd notice there's two different languages that they both speak a lot better than they do this one, and a scattering of other weirdly shaped languages they have bits and pieces of.

The gesture is at least straight forward. It's a basic acknowledgement of someone's presence, with a connotation of approval.

The pair is drawing level with Zarian, They don't seem like they're planning to stop hiking unless she does something to indicate they should.

Zarian wasn't formerly that into conlangs but she picked up more of them after she started dating Colley; she's familiar with ones that're built rather lopsidedly compared against natural languages.  The ones people write exactly one musical in or host songwriting contests in aren't generally known for their breadth of vocabulary, and the level of knowledge the two hikers have isn't that unusual although the pedagogical method would be if she were paying closer attention to it.

At the moment she has other concerns.  She spends most of their approach making sure she has the grammar down on, "Hello!  I'm lost, may I walk with you awhile?"  If the conlang has the vocab to support that she'll stick with that since that's what she's picked up more of, but if it doesn't she'll rush a phrasing in the main language.

Yeah, the language has the vocab to support it, though the time units for "awhile" were extremely unhelpful.

"I'd enjoy if you shared the road with us!" The one in blue switches their stream of conversation from their compatriot to Zarian as soon as the opportunity presents itself. "If you have lost your way then you may want to know we're going further out and up. What's the etymology of your path here?" Okay that phrasing was also awkward. "You can call me Patik, what do you want me to call you?" Their name has a quite different pronunciation scheme than the rest of the language, a rapid clash of consonants. "I'm excited to talk with someone who knows nomic-lingua-quarta!" Ah, the language Patik is using has a name. A name that maybe implies something about it's design. Yeah, this feels like a conlang.

"Handle's Deptka."

Deptka doesn't try anything complicated, but sticks to nomic-lingua-quarta. Instead of interjecting into the conversation, they speed up briefly, making space for Zarian to take their place closest to Patik as they hike.

"Zarian." 'Someone who knows nomic-lingua-quarta' makes no sense, but it doesn't make any more no sense than several other aspects of the situation and anyways that sort of confusion's to be expected when she's this new at being someone who knows any nomic-lingua-quarta.  "I got location-[semantic change (mischievous alterations as an attempt at sowing confusion)]'d."  Do these people know any Cretari, or for that matter any other language Zarian can speak?  "What distance exists between greater numbers of people and the location you want to achieve?"

They do not appear to know any Cretari, or for that matter any other languages Zarian has heard of. Deptka has stray bits of vocabulary from a lot of languages but only seems good at two, plus some kind of dialect variation on one of them. Patik has four solidly and conversational access to three more, though half of those have the feel of conlangs where Patik is tracking changes or forks. Case in point: the one they're speaking now calls itself the fourth version of itself.

""location-[semantic change (mischievous alterations as an attempt at sowing confusion)]'d"- that's a dedicated [family group or loanword source], they should be proud! Do you have a guess how you were brought so far from your root?" Right, this is a language about languages its word for family is primarily about linguistic origins. Patik seems to think Zarian's talking about a prank? And one Patik apparently thinks is funny at that.

"We're attempting a. . ." Patik has to do a bit of math, evidently some kind of unit conversion, before because they eventually go with "hundred thousand thousand point today. I think." Oh, the only unit of distance this language wants to use is based on the point sizes of typefaces. Zarian can probably tell Patik is committing to the bit, because there was obviously a better unit of measurement they could have used. "We did that a day in the past too but that's to get up onto the peak, we'll go that and half again a day in the future and then likely feel like we have room to breath. That's from the- nope," Here Patik gives up and uses a word from one of the main languages they and Deptka share to say "fast travel station."

That's so long.  Zarian does not particularly want to stay out in the wilderness that long, currently.

...But these people are friendly enough and seem to know what they're doing, and she's so deeply confused about so much that's going on here.  And the idea of stepping away from other people feels - hm, yes, in expectation foolish because even though it seems like there are more people in the direction opposite to the one these two are travelling in, she has no real sense of what she might run into in the interim or how she would go about handling it.

"There was a run-on sentence animal with a rhyming face; I don't know that my [family group or loanword source] could have caused it.  I may share the path with you for a sentence more likely than a paragraph."

"Rhyming face...?" Patik seems to be enjoying the puzzle, pondering that as they step over several flat stones put across the path in a water bar. "I feel like that's very clever* but I don't know what you mean. Did it carry you up here? If you have a [subject which supports an object] we can swing by to pick it up, especially if it has your pack." 

*Nomic-lingua-quarta's word for "clever" means "good with languages." The only other prominent word it has for intellectual prowess means something like "demonstrating that you could be good with languages if you applied yourself." It's a very opinionated language. 

"They lack a smallpack."

"Obviously the [encapsulating bracket] has small footnotes!"

"I only have this," she gestures to herself.  "It didn't carry me; I went through the face, which was large, flat, and - "  She puts one hand up as if resting on a vertical surface in front of her, then brings the other up to meet it - "rhyming.  Subjectively I instantly travelled to a location up there."  Point.

"I still don't know what you mean."

"Oh, maybe-"

"Request we do this in Overlap. Pidgin if needed."

Patik makes a sound that translates just fine, a longsuffering groan and throwing their hands up. "Fiiiiiine. Later though." They make a couple of clicks, clearing their throat, and then starts in the main language the two of them know best. This one has a vastly less specialized and opinionated vocabulary, though it's maybe a little terse. It does in fact have a word for "sandwich."

"You ran into a long animal with some kind of symmetric or aesthetic face. It knocked you out and you woke up here? Are you hurt?"

"Repetition?" she requests, in Overlap.

Patik makes a fast, sweeping gesture with one hand that looks vaguely like a conductor signaling the end of a symphony, then speeds up to get several paces ahead. Deptka steps forward into their place.

"Question: Are you injured?"

"Question: What is your handle*?"

"Question: What day is it?"

"Question: Where are you?

*A word that clearly isn't synonymous with name, but is basically what you want people to call you.

"No; Zarian; the fifth of - "

"You keep time differently."

"You keep time much differently.  Than I.  ...Do."

"There's lots of ways to keep time!"

"Statement: You speak Overlap. Overlap time is kept the same."

Overlap as a language is very different from nomic-lingua-quarta. It's full of rapid starts and stops and hard consonants. The verbal language is accompanied by hand gestures, paired in a way where you could actually mostly understand a sentence from either the verbal or the signed. Deptka is also using it tersely, saying as few words as they can while Patik is doing something with syllable count that's more expressive, somewhat like a haiku. 

"Statement: If an animal brought you here, you would be injured."

"Statement:  You years seem to muchly more long than I know!"  This is exciting enough that she doesn't feel like slowing down to get the grammar; the hand gestures she'll throw in insofar as they come conveniently attached with the concepts in Deptka's brain and don't require extra attention from her.  ...But maybe that was overboard.  "Your years seem to muchly more long than those I know."  She switches from walking to skipping.  "Question:  How do you mean, 'You speak Overlap'?  I did not already!"

"Statement: everyone* who speaks Overlap is expected to use the same calendar in Overlap."

Question: where did you learn Overlap?" 

*A word where the literal meaning is what "everyone" colloquially means in English. It isn't wrong to say that everyone has two eyes in Overlap, there's a different word for when you do actually include the tails of the distribution. 

Patik makes some kind of excited, fluttering hand gestures that actually have the Overlap meaning "wait wait I want to solve this puzzle" while making vocalizations that are the barest gesture at those words, consisting of some staticy squeaking. 

Zarian doesn't catch much of that since she's been prioritizing the spoken portion and everything's going so fast.  "Statement:  I learn it now by milening from you two!"

"Statement: You're using words we haven't yet, like milening."

"Relax Deptka, maybe they don't want to talk about it or they have superpowers or they're telling stories." 

- That's very confusing.  That's confusing enough to check these people's - they don't have it??  At all????

"I am superpower milening."

(Also what's the connotations of including or excluding the introductory 'Statement:' and 'Question:'s; so far she's non-citrelièvously figured out that it's not grammatically necessary, and she thinks she's more like Patik than like Deptka so she leaves it off here, but she should really actually check.)

"See, they're just using a superpower."

"Wait."

"If you truly have superpowers* that would be cool. I'd like to invite you to show off?!?"

*The core use of "superpower" here is something like "magic trick" with a stage magician, but for more fields. A possible idiom among subcultures might call it a "fingersnap" except more repeatable. 

"Statement: I've observed two languages, neither one private."

So, the statement and question thing. 

Overlap has a marker for the type of sentence. It's a short prefix to the first word. Not using it makes the sentence incorrect, but it's incorrect the way a sentence without a subject or object is incorrect. "I'm getting a drink. You want?" or "Going to the store." are both incorrect, but understandable. The ambiguity is there, and the listener just has to figure it out from context. 

Deptka is also using a somewhat more constrained set of words with less gesture and emotive expression in their voice, but it's mostly that they're using all the parts of a sentence that are required to be there. 

That sounds like an invitation to check whether any of Patik's languages are private.

Patik speaks somewhere between three and ten languages.

Three are complex, they're used to using them with lots of people, they're fluent and comfortable with them. Overlap, Nomic Lingua Duos, and Aeyeia. 

Five of the others are dialects of each other. For instance, Patik knows some Nomic Lingua Tri and Nomic Lingua Quarta, where they have substantial changes but the basic roots and vocabulary are the similar. It's a bit less than the difference between Spanish to Portuguese, a bit more than the difference between Python and Python 3. Overlap forms the base for several languages that layer a lot of extra jargon on top and add a lot more phonemes and cheremes; in particular, they drop a rule Overlap has that a sign must be able to be made with one hand. 

Two are private. The vocabulary has large chunks of unexplored space; not the way Nomic Lingua tends to have gaps as a kind of aesthetic or joke where they commit to the bit, but the way a hobbiest conlang has gaps because the author hasn't come up with anything. One of those Deptka doesn't know, it's conveyed with light strokes along the other person's arm and low crooning, and the contents are largely about food and noise and reassurance. One of those is shared with Deptka, is entirely signed, and the vocabulary is a bit more built out but the grammar is almost nonexistant; the use has a lot of noun-verb pairings and not much else. "Apple eat." " Couch-end hold." "Find book." "Hold me." 

That's more intimate than she was expecting and she could probably stand to be more careful in the future!  Nonetheless, she signs "speak true" in the shared-with-Deptka one.

"You have superpowers!"

Deptka changes direction, stepping closer to Patik. Their already clipped movements become a lot faster.

"Understatement: I have security concerns."

"Statement:  That seems founded."

"Question: What are your goals?"

"Statement: I want immediately to not die of nature and not-immediately to orient to this place!  Hello!!  I have never been a place before this that was not my place; is this place used to receiving people from many places?"

Patik bounces lightly on their feet despite the heavy load of the pack. "You have superpowers! You're welcome to our food and our fire. How far away are you from, you look like us but like Depkta said everywhere has Overlap. If you just learned it you're really not from around here."

Depkta switches to the private language with Patik, expresses "Prefer keep food" and then cuts themself off before continuing. 

Simultaneously, they say in the clipped form of Overlap; "You're welcome to our food and our fire. Are you hungry?"

"Statement: I can also superpower milen hungry.  I will only die of nature if alone or with hurt people or very specific things occur."

"Statement: You can't DO that! That violates Conservation of Energy!"

"Question:  What?"

"It's a physics law that you break, if you really can replace food by milening from us. Which is impressive and we want to learn how. What else can you milen, can you show us something?"

"Statement: I concern that if no one here can superpower milen my body maybe be better than every body here.  If this is true I do not want to much change it."

"Wait- you can't switch back? I'd like to hear more about how this works!" 

"Statement: I can superpower milen things and then that is how I am.  I can change the way that I am in all the slow ways as well, by eating or exercising for physique or by waiting for hair to grow if I take a short way, but it is all copying from other nearby people.  If there is a way to be that no one has there is no way to get it except by - trying to get it however people might do that without superpower milen."

"Huh. That does limit a lot of what you could show off. Which is, before Depkta says it, suspicious that you can't show off more tests. You don't want to change your body. Did learning our language - which, before Depkta says it, yes I am taking as a given - erase yours? Oh oh oh, what are your languages like?"

Depkta signs in the private language, "Love," and then stops, self conscious, holding themself stiffly. 

In Cretari: "Then take this at face value."  (It rhymes.)  "Statement: I could willingly demonstrate with freckles or similar?  Also I think maybe I am much stronger and faster than every body here, I could show that.  - I am superpower milen your body heats frequently?  You can feel that I do not get cold despite no sleeves."  She offers an arm.

"I'll take it on trust, Depkta will keep being concerned about security. Do you want to pull more stuff from me? I assume you got the language. You might want more languages? You should take more Aeyeia, do you like to sing? You could milen energy, Depkta says I have a lot of that."

"I am more fit than you and have more energy but thank you!  I like to sing normally.  Is it smart to be more fluent in Overlap before another language?"

"I think it's Important* to be more fluent in every language!"

*A word here that combines the kind of obsession you need with a subject to do a couple Ph.Ds in it with the kind of cultural dedication you need to continue practicing a persecuted religion, and is only sometimes exaggerating. 

"But it will go faster the less I parallel."

"Fiiiiiine. Yes if you're just trying to get around Overlap is most of the way, you'll be able to talk with most everyone within a few thousand miles. Any other language has fewer users. If you want to talk to a certain kind of person though I can probably give suggestions for their language."

"Statement: I learn Overlap as fast as possible.  Then another, and then another!  Maybe the singing one first."