Something changed.

There was a tiny dot on the horizon, next to the pillar. The dot started moving in her direction.

It took her a while to notice the movement, but after an hour she was sure of it. The dot was getting bigger, and therefore closer.

Change! She didn't care if the speck was going to hunt her down or help her out, it was a break in the dull monotony of what must at this point have been weeks of walking. She ran to meet it.

It was approaching fast. Another change; something that wasn't happening at a snail's pace.

Soon, she could tell the shape of the thing. Boxy. Definitely not natural, the angles were too sharp to be a living thing. It was grey, but not the same grey that the dusty ground of the wasteland, more like unpolished metal. And its movement kicked up the dust beneath it.

A vehicle. She was right! The pillar meant civilisation!

It was close now. She could hear the noise of an engine, the dirt flying away as it used some sort of air cushion to move. Only now she could truly appreciate how fast the vehicle was moving.

It slowed down, and finally stopped a few meters from her.

Large metal door slid up, and out came three people.

At least, she assumed they were people; while they weren't human, they drove a vehicle, so surely they were intelligent enough to earn the status of a person.

The one in the front was a tall, lanky, green skinned man wearing some sort of black uniform. He had no hair and a single horn in the middle of his forehead.

Behind him, there were two blue-scaled creatures of a centaur-esque body plan. Four muscular legs like those of a comodo dragon, their torso then curving upwards with a pair of mostly human arms. Each reptilian held a shockingly normal looking assault rifle. They wore the same shade of black on their lower torsos, but their upper chests were exposed.

"Good job on surviving." The green man spoke. "We're here to help you get to Citadel. We don't mean any harm, and you can of course refuse. But seeing as you've probably been making your way to us for quite a while now, it would be easier to just hitch a ride with us."

He wasn't speaking English, she realised, and yet she could understand him perfectly.

"How can I understand what you're saying?" She asked.

The green man smiled. "Always interesting to see what people aske about first. The system implements knowledge of a shared language into every newcomer. We call it the oldspeak. Now, we are scouts, not teachers, but you can ask a few things while ride back. Assuming you're coming with us?"

She nodded hastily. The three creatures went back into the odd vehicle, and she followed them.

The green man sat down in the front seat, while the reptilians sat on the ground in the back of the vehicle and strapped themselves into some kind of harness. She supposed they couldn't exactly sit down on a chair.

She elected to seat in the front, next to the green pilot of this...

"What's is this vehicle?"

"Maglev. Short for magical levitation. The bottom creates a field magically attuned to the opposite properties than that of the ground of the Barren, and shifts the field to create propulsion. The fastest method of travel short of teleportation, but that takes too much energy." The pilot explained as he started the vehicle up.

"The Barren... is that what's this place called? Place, planet?"

"Yes. As to whether this is a planet... complicated. As I'm sure you've noticed, there isn't much in the way of anything in the sky. Hard to do astronomy without any 'astro', eh? You could call it a planet, a world, a dimension... all we know for sure it's that in the oldspeak it's named the Barren, and that we ain't leaving it. Many tried."

"So no going back home?"

"Nope. The rifts are only one way, dimensional shifting doesn't work, divination of anything from the outside fails. Crap, I forgot to ask you if you even had magic where you come from."

"We didn't, but we had stories. I can kind of deduce what you're talking about." She assured him.

"A smart one. Good. Living here ain't easy. Keep your senses wide open, your wits sharp, and a watch nearby. That's what my father taught me."

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"Your father? So you were born here?"

"Yes. The Barren lacks many things, inter-species barriers being one of them. So even though rifters - that is people who got dropped in here through a rift, like you - come from all sorts of different worlds and are varied in species, we can still have kids with each other."

"Huh. So I still need to wear protection?"

The green man laughed.

"Good to see you have a sense of humor. Just getting enough food and water and whatever else you need isn't all that survival depends on. If you get too depressed, too bored... eventually you stop caring. About others. About yourself. Then you starve with a plate of food in front of you, because you can't be bothered to take a bite. We call it Greying out." He frowned. "Seen a bunch of folks end up that way. The worst way to go, I'd say."

She sighed. "You don't have to tell me about it. I had at most two interesting things happen to me here, and one of them was me waking up stuck in a tree. Walking was so long. Nothing was changing! That's why your dad said to keep a watch on you, right? So you can tell that time is actually passing."

The pilot nodded. "Most people here were not designed by a god or a scientist. They evolved. People are meant to adapt to their environment, but when there's nothing to adapt to, your mind can't cope with that. It's why I took the job as a scout. I get to meet new rifters, talk to them. Pay is good, too, but the variety was the selling point."

"Pay... so this isn't exactly fully automated luxury gay space communism, huh?" She quipped.

"I understood only most of those words." He admitted.

"Didn't you say we magically speak oldspeak?" She frowned, confused.

"If there's an equivalent in oldspeak, you will instinctively replace the word you meant with the oldspeak version. But if you say something that's unique to your world, there isn't an equivalent, so you just say the word as if you were speaking your original language." He explained. "Or that's how it supposedly works, I only know oldspeak to begin with."

"Long story short, I was making a joke."

"Oh, no no no no no." He shook his head. "I'm not passing this up. Outside concepts? I gotta hear that.

"Okay, which words didn't get translated?"

"The first one was 'gey', and the other was 'com-moon-ism'."

Well, that doesn't bode well.

"Okay, I kinda get how it didn't go through, they are two a bit complicated concepts. Stop me if I say another thing that doesn't go through. First, 'gay' is generally meant when talking about a man that's attracted to other men, though it is also sometimes used to refer to anyone that isn't in 'straight'."

"Okay, I got all of those words, but... why do you have a word for that?" He asked, bewildered. "That's just a thing everyone does at some point."

"Does 'homophobia' translate?"

His confusion grew. "It does. Again, why would anyone care?"

She laughed, a note of sadness clearly audible in it. "My species, my original species, that is, has a wide array of tribalistic instincts. Figuring out what doesn't belong so the tribe can be safe. Excluding, say, murderers. Unfortunately, those instincts can be leveraged to make people seem dangerous by focusing on their differences. Playing on the fear of the unknown. Every so often a society would be taken over by a movement who defined very strictly what's 'normal', and got rid of anyone else. Hatred like that isn't a stable foundation for a country, however, so these things fall apart. Everyone says 'never again', but the whole thing repeats in a couple of decades."

The pilot sighed. "That's... sad. I'm sorry. In Citadel, we don't really care how you look, or what you do with others, as long as they know what they're getting into and are okay with it."

"That's nice. I've had communities like that, but to see a whole society that's tolerant is a great relief."

"What about that second word?"

She groaned.

"How does money here work?"

It quickly turned out that Citadel operated on a system that was sort of in-between capitalism and true socialism. Yes, there were still those who owned capital, but everyone's basic needs were provided for. Food and housing was abundant there, so everyone got their share of it regardless if or where they worked. It was good enough for her personal needs to be satisfied, though the idealist in her screamed to start a revolution as soon as she set foot out of the maglev.

"Your model doesn't work here, though." The green pilot shook his head. "They don't just own the 'means of production', as you say. The council is made up of long lived, high level, powerful individuals. A few of them were there when the colony was founded, and they've been growing in power ever since. If you try to rebel against them, they'd crush you with a blink."

"Welp, I guess it's back to trying to survive in an imperfect system. I'm not gonna get myself killed just to have a moral high ground. There's even odds I'll publish a manifesto, though. How are things here with censorship?"

They talked like that through the rest of the trip, until finally, the maglev sat down on the ground before Citadel.

Up close, the spire was enormous. She recalled a tale of mortals who were trying to build a tower that would reach heaven. Unlike the story, this one seemed to have succeeded. No matter how high she raised her gaze, the gigantic structure just kept going.

It looked like made out of the blackest obsidian glass, though any illusion of it being in any way brittle was shattered by its mere size. On the sides, there were several elevators built, going up and down on scheduled trips, delivering packed goods to the top, and going down empty save for the worker delivering the crates.

Below, though utterly eclipsed by the black spire, was another impressive sight. A city, full of skyscrapers and two-story buildings alike, structures resembling familiar metropolis architecture neighbored creations of simple looking smooth stone, with futuristic-looking steel hangars peppered in among them.

It was a sprawling monument of eclecticism of style and technology from millions of different worlds and cultures. She felt inspired by the sight. If she trusted the scout who found her, this place was, despite being located in the Barren, much more hospitable to someone like her than the dimension she was ripped from.

Whether she liked it or not, she got a new start, and she would use it to its fullest.