As Dana was plunging through the gate, she felt the gate itself twist. Uh oh, she thought, landing in the middle of a pond. She pulled herself up, shook out some of the water, and looked around. She saw a peasant with an oxcart. Damn, she thought, remembering that the goddesses's Girlworld was a high tech world with great wealth engineered by the goddesses's magical power, not a place with a lot of peasants and oxcarts. She took a closer look, and then realized that the peasant was a man.
Yep, definitely the wrong world. The peasant looked like a standard model human, so Dana quickly changed her appearance into that of a human of approximately the same racial type--the horns, spiked tail, and fangs of demonkind, she had discovered, tended to give people the wrong idea, and although she would be perfectly capable of dealing with a mob of angry villagers, she preferred to spend as little time on this world as possible. (Dana didn't realize it, but her illusionary form was surpassingly beautiful by local standards--this kind of thing was so automatic among demons that it took a conscious effort to choose an ugly or even just moderate attractive shape.) She would need to either find out the location of another magical gate or a device that could be used to power a gate. If there wasn't one available, she would have to create a gate herself--a formidable task!
"Ow." came a cry from her bag. "Bumpy ride!" "Shut up" muttered Dana. She began to tap into the magical energies of this world, which were subtle, difficult to access directly. A low magic world, and quite possibly a low-tech one as well. In other words, a dump.
The peasant stood there, in awestruck wonder at this strange yet lovely apparition.