She's in free fall.

Not for very long, though; it only takes a couple of seconds for her to land in water. Salt water, too.

WHAT THE FUCK!

She splutters and flounders and manages to avoid swallowing sea water in her flailing. What! What!!! Why is this a thing that's happening!!

Tempest notices her panic and makes an attempt to instantiate to see what's going on; Madeline does the metaphysical equivalent of putting a hand in front of her nose. Tempest could push through if she really wanted to, but trusts her enough to not. No, no kitty, you don't. You don't want to be out here right now.

Swimming with shoes and a bag (oh man her phone is going to be a brick, at least her sketchbook will probably be fine? she got the expensive water resistant kind) is hard and furthermore stupid. She's a conjurer, she doesn't literally need sketches for all of her conjurations, making a flat box in the air that contains the aforementioned air so it'll float is straightforward enough. Madeline has made plenty of boxes in her time. She stops her flailing to motion to make it above her, briefly goes under the water while she waits for it to fall with a splash, and then scrambles aboard. She didn't have the foresight to give it any kind of handholds or texture or anything, it's just a flat rectangular box that is big enough to contain a person. With air in it. So it floats.

She awkwardly balances on her shitty conjured raft, notes things she'd add to a second iteration to make it suck less, and says, loudly, in a voice bemoaning the unfairness of the world, "Why!"

The world does not seem to contain answers to her question, or at least if it does it is not giving her them.

What the world does contain is a beach in the distance. Not one of those nice paradisiacal beaches with warm white sand and palm trees and a holiday resort, though. It's more of a glorified inlet into tall and imposing cliffwalls which extend almost as far as the eye can see to her left and right. The cliffs are very strange, though, with tall rock pillar formations that end in mushroom-like tops or help support consecutive shelves of stone. 

The little inlet she can see has a few ramps up to the lowest such shelf, and most relevantly there are people there. People with... guns? And cannons? Big guns and cannons, including one turret half again as tall as the tallest shelf upon which a tiny speck that might be a person is seated. And if she looks with some more attention... there seems to be a large shadow in the water between her and the beach, heading for it.

Um.

Okay so her first instinct would be to head to the beach, but context tells her that perhaps this would be a... bad move.

She busies herself making her raft suck less while she tries to figure out what to actually... do. Rounded corners! Raised edges with a dip in the center! Hand holds! Maybe change the middle of the it's-not-really-a-box-anymore to be soft and squishy so it's less uncomfortable to be on! Little dome around the raft because she senses that perhaps things are about to get messy somehow! Fixing the weight distribution of the raft and dome so that the bottom is the heaviest part while also still containing the air so that it'll nonetheless float!

It is fortunate for her that there's a lot of technical detail to get lost in while she's filled with a growing sense of panic, because if there wasn't, she'd probably just be sitting here like an idiot staring in confusion.

Well, instead of staring in confusion, she can stare in terror as the shadow in the water emerges from it all in one go. It looks like a whale, if whales were approximately ten to twenty times larger than they actually are and shaped very weirdly. Numerous people at the beach immediately charge, running or riding uh, ?horses? into the shallower parts of the water. At the same time, the various cannons start going off, hitting the creature, for all the good that does.

(Not any, is the good that does. The creature seems to pretty much not give a shit.)

Um??? Um!

What the fuck is going on!

Tempest pokes her head out of their creation space (proverbially, it's actually all of her), is out for all of two seconds, spots what's going on, puffs up in fear, and immediately retreats back inside. Yeah, kitty, you said it. She wishes she could do that too! She cannot! She cannot do that too! Why is she on some kind of battlefield that seems devoted to fighting some kind of B rated monster movie! Really what even is the design of that thing, there isn't any kind of striking silhouette, no bad Madeline not the time.

She adds a little propeller to the bottom of her bubble raft. It works by her paying attention to it and telling it to spin, which is tedious and irritating but kind of worth it in these circumstances. Her little conjured dome raft begins speeding away from this whatever-this-is, and meanwhile she busies herself wringing out her hair and tying it up and looking through her belongings to see how it handled the water. Everything's soaked, is the answer.

The fight continues.

Although the cannon hits don't seem to damage the beast, they seem to be causing various... smaller creatures? That are attached to it? To fall from its body and into the water. They then proceed to swim towards the beach, and the purpose of the ground troops becomes clear: to kill them. In, uh, close combat, apparently.

But then something changes about the monster. Its black silhouette is gone, suddenly, revealing... well, much the same, except grey instead of black. Some sort of forcefield? And then it gets a more proper forcefield, spherical and glowing purple-blue and surrounding it. It pulses for a couple of seconds, then starts expanding outwards in every direction.

When it hits the ground combatants and the little creatures they're fighting they are immediately turned to dust.

Hoooooly shit, she just watched a lot of people die and all she can think is that this is very confusing and like far too much is going on at once.

She feels like she made the correct choice with the direction her bubble is going! Maybe she should stop looking at the battle/slaughter, but actually no what if something happens and she needs to react to it, who cares about a bit of measly lifelong trauma when the alternative is death! Why is this happening! What's going on! This is too real to be a nightmare and it's really obviously not but please can it be a nightmare!

Not everyone is dead. Mostly because not everyone was a ground trooper and there seem to really be a few hundred people there, though. More cannons are fired, and the creature spawns a second forcefield, now that its first one was spent (to kill a lot of people). Then it starts ponderously turning around as the big turret starts glowing—any sense of narrative here would indicate probably everything else was just buying time to charge up the big fucking gun.

It shoots. It shoots lasers, because of course it does, lightning lasers that concentrate into a single point of the creature's new shield. It tries to counteract the laser, expanding its shield again, but the laser seems to actually be winning, pushing its shield back, it might be able to pierce the shield—

—no. That would be too good to be true. Whether it's on purpose or not, the part of the forcefield that's taking the brunt of the damage shrinks closer to the creature, which gives the surrounding parts of the shield the ability to expand outwards. One bubble, in particular, right to the left of the point of laser impact, starts bubbling out and out and out... and out. It explodes outwards, just like the first shield did, but smaller and more concentrated, and obliterates the laser turret, with explosions and all the dramatic firework one might want.

The cannon shots stop, then. Everything else stops. Everything... stops. If those people were relying on the laser turret... it failed.

Madeline wants so badly to hug her cat and cry, but A: Tempest is safest where she is and that is the most important thing, and B: actually she's kind of too shell shocked to get anywhere close to crying? All she's doing is just staying stuck in a loop of this can't be happening, this is impossible and crazy and and and while she sits here watching whatever the hell this is happen! Mostly she just feels numb. Numb and, and coldly efficient, she shouldn't just go out to sea, actually, she should turn the little propeller that she's still making spin so that it sends her land-ward but still ultimately away from the it's-definitely-a-slaughter-now.

Uh, air, she should. She should make sure to replenish air in here, she made it air tight. She waits until a wave passes to rip a hole open in the top of the dome, then closes it back up before the next one hits. Probably she didn't need to do that yet, probably there was enough oxygen in here for her to be fine, but. But. What else does she do.

Nothing, probably. Everyone else seems to have given up, everyone else who survived anyway.

The monster waits, quietly, frozen in place, for a whole minute, two, three. Then it turns, it slowly turns away from the site of the slaughter, and starts to ponderously submerge itself again to leave.

Okay. Cool. Good. Well, not good, everything is terrible, but. The level of terrible is settling down and it looks like it's leveling out to post slaughter despair. Which is, on the whole, better than active terror for her life? Probably?

She gives the giant kaiju a wide fucking berth as she propels her way back to land to figure out some... percentage.... of what the fuck is going on. Because. No, seriously, what the fuck is going on.

The kaiju ignores her entirely and swims away into the distance, not even its shadow visible anymore.

The survivors take a while to trust their safety, and even then it seems like there aren't that many of them that are doing... anything. At all. A handful, really, going down to the beach, to look for survivors, to walk amongst the few corpses around (since most were disintegrated by the monster) and take a tally. The various machines, cannons, guns, tents vary in how badly they got hit by the aftershocks of the attack or by the small symbiotes the kaiju dropped, but there's nowhere that's been completely spared.

She makes it to shore, somewhere on the edges of this mess, and releases her stupid dome raft conjuration. Its grey, unreal form disappears entirely. For a few seconds, she stands awkwardly on shore, feeling like she doesn't have any sort of right to burst into this tragedy and open the can of worms that is 'WHERE AM I AND HOW DID I GET HERE,' but. ... She's a conjurer. There's kind of obviously not one here already? She's not properly certified for medical... anything... her class on emergency conjuration first aid and anatomy sketches in her sketchbook just in case notwithstanding, but she specialized in architecture and manufacturing. A lot of things have fallen over, many of them on people. She's moderately qualified to get those things off of those people, and maybe even do some kind of shitty patch job to keep them alive while she waits for... professionals??? to come handle it.

(There is no guarantee that there are professionals to come handle it. The construction of everything is different, the technology level is alien and foreign, the cries of despair echoing are in a language she doesn't even recognize, and there are apparently little monster things? That came off of the big monster thing to come attack people?? She is so incredibly out of her depth on so many levels!!!)

Okay, uh. She goes to getting objects off of people. She conjures something as close to water as she can get it, and steers it along the underside of this promising bit of debris that is likely to contain at least one person, maybe even still alive. This operates entirely by feel and this is so incredibly not in her element and it doesn't matter, it's clearly not in anyone else's element here, either. She will get her conjuration all along the bottom side of some of the debris, a thin little forcefield of not-matter wedged in between at a spot that doesn't look like it's load bearing. And then, oh-so-carefully, she will force it up and off and sliding into a pile to the empty sand nearby. She will err on the side of caution, getting little bits at a time heaviest things first, because these sorts of things are delicate, and wrong moves could send large heavy objects down to squish the victims she's out to save.

The underside of the debris does contain one person! Two people even! She can tell they are two people by how the number of torsos there is two. The number of legs attached to them is zero, though.

She winces. Yeah, that'll. Be burned forever in her skull.

Any pulses present? She can staunch bleeding with conjuration, but she can't fix death.

No, they're. They're very gone.

She thought so, but it's good form to check.

Onwards. There's a lot more debris to sift through. And maybe even some people to save.

There are fewer people than the scale of the massacre would suggest, courtesy of the disintegration ray probably, and the ones she finds are almost invariably dead: caught by the forcefield only partially and bled out since then, killed by one of the little symbiotic monsters, crushed or cut into pieces by falling debris from the various pieces of architecture and machinery that did not survive the attack.

Her first survivor is someone who is sitting against one of the cliff walls, farther away from the water than any of the corpses. His left leg has been crushed by a fallen cannon, and he has the pale clammy look and breathing pattern of someone who's going (or gone) into shock.

Amazing! A survivor! She could almost cry from the relief! Except for how she feels hollow and dead inside!

Okay, what does she do now that she's found one. How does she keep him alive with all of her jack shit for qualifications and knowledge of emergency conjuration triage? How does she not make this... worse. She... wraps a conjured bandage-cast thing around the leg, uniquely qualified to fill every weird little nook and cranny that might be bleeding. Her pressure is firm, but gentle. Bleeding out is what will kill him. Her first instinct is that probably this would be easier if she just cut the whole damn leg off and staunched the stump, but. Maybe the leg can be saved. One does not just chop off a guy's leg because you think it's maybe the best option to save his life. She doesn't really know what she's doing, except 'her best.'

The man barely reacts to her ministrations. He stares at her and tries to say something but seems unable to, and merely shivers instead. His short, shallow breaths don't really get any better, though, and his skin is covered with sweat and feels cold to the touch.

Madeline does not have any delusions about being able to fix him. She just wants to keep him alive long enough for someone else that might be able to manage it to get the chance. In the interests of that, she's going to need to move him somewhere he'll be easier to find. Fortunately this is fairly easy, for her, with conjuration and some empty parts of beach. Cannon: off of leg. Man: bundled gently in a conjured cocoon and moved somewhere he'll be easier to find. A nice, vaguely centralized location. So that maybe he'll live.

(Or maybe she's just prolonging his suffering, and he'll die no matter what she does. She doesn't know, except that thinking like that is fatalistic and useless and she's more likely to save them by trying than by not.)

"Try not to die," she says, when he's moved and as stabilized as an unqualified conjurer can manage. She's got more wreckage to sift through. But he can have a sip from her water bottle before she goes?

He shivers some more, looking at her, but does manage to swallow some water.

Awesome. (It's not, but she'll take it.)

And then back to work. Any other survivors she finds can be brought back to join her One Singular (maybe) Success. The bodies, she doesn't have time for. There are far, far too many of them.