She can find more survivors. Slowly, painstakingly, one by one. By the time she finds her fourth survivor, the first guy has died, but so it goes. Some of them are in better condition, and some even in good enough condition to actually ask things in a language she definitely does not speak.

"I don't speak your language. I'm sorry. I don't know what's going on, either," she tells them in a tired voice. They can have water (until she runs out, which doesn't take long) and conjured grey not-bandages that don't react to the light properly, and what sound like comforting words from this weirdly dressed woman with powers they've never seen before. And then she's got more people to maybe dig out. She expects they're not going to get in her way, even if they're rightfully confused.

(She closes the eyes of the first guy, and moves him away from prime to-be-maybe-saved real estate. It wouldn't do for there to be a corpse among the survivors, wasting the time of someone trying to save people with more competence than her. She doesn't cry, and doesn't think she could possibly remember how.)

A boy shows up. And it's definitely a boy, not some war veteran or anything like that, he can't be older than twenty. And however different the clothes these people were wearing were from what she's used to, they still resembled uniforms, with padded armour bits and helmets and whatnot. This boy is not wearing anything like that. He looks like he's wearing something that could be ceremonial, if ceremonies were often held nearly nude.

His arms and lower legs are covered by arm and leg wraps in similar styles, an intricate spiral of cloth ending in half gloves or sandals with jewels adorning them. He's wearing a thick ornate skirt, white and dark blue and ending just before his knees, with more jewels inlaid into its waistband and along the rim of the division between the colours. And his torso is bare except for a series of silver necklaces, starting with something that's nearly a choker then widening into something that reaches halfway down his chest. He also has a cloth harness attached to his arms and back that holds a long ornate staff clipped onto his back.

He asks something, in the same language those injured people did, but that's before he notices that they're actually alive and the strange woman isn't just collecting corpses. At that point he immediately unclips his staff and starts performing expansive gestures with it and his free hand, which causes lights to start glowing from within the bodies of each of the survivors. And they start... healing. Healing, if not regenerating outright.

If she were less exhausted and emotionally wrung out she'd likely be embarrassed or something? By the boy around her age that isn't wearing very many clothes? But there isn't enough left inside her to feel much of anything, so she doesn't. All that's there is just relief that someone is here that seems like he knows literally anything about what he's doing. She's so, so glad that she's not alone, trying to steal people from the jaws of death all by herself with no idea if she can manage it.

She should... probably go back to find more people to dig out, but she's so tired. She has no idea how long she's been doing this. Uh. That's probably bad. Likely to lead to making mistakes. Maybe she should... sit down. Or something. She does that. While Healer Guy does his healing thing. She can watch while he works, because what the fuck even is that.

Magic, apparently. He can't regenerate lost limbs, it seems, but the people he's healing don't seem to expect him to; they're relieved rather than surprised or dismayed when his magic heals their missing limbs into stumps. They talk a bit, not very animatedly because even healed they're still hurt and probably need to conserve their energy, but some of the survivors point at her and the boy looks in her direction as they do and nods in understanding. At one point he grabs a small glass vial from a bag attached to his waist filled with a translucent blueish liquid and downs it in one go, and then he resumes healing everyone until he's through with all of them.

The first ones he's healed seem to be feeling well enough to walk or limp back over to where he came from, in the main camp, and when he's done with the last one he turns to Madeline and smiles a bit sadly at her.

"Yaaaay, everything I did wasn't pointless. Take that, entropy," she mumbles, when the healer looks at her. She... attempts a sad smile back? How do facial muscles work, she has no idea anymore.

Tempest has noticed the lull in activity, and ventures out. Beside the woman (girl, maybe?) appears a fluffy grey cat, crouched and sniffing at her human with clear disdain. The grey is a more natural grey than the unreal conjured grey of her constructs, but not... entirely unlike them.

"Hi, kitty," Madeline coos to her familiar, offering the cat a hand to sniff. "I know I smell bad. I'm sorry. Can I pet you?"

The cat dodges the attempted scritches, instead opting to begin cleaning her with a little pink sandpaper tongue. Madeline snorts and holds her hand still. For her bath.

The boy starts when the cat appears and stares at it slack-jawed. Then he shakes his head quickly and asks her something in a different language than the one he and everyone else had been using until then.

"Nope. Not that one either. Try again," Madeline says, with some dry humor, but yeah okay maybe she should attempt to tackle the language barrier. She fetches her sketchbook, which is still a little damp, but has dried out enough to write in, if she's careful and doesn't press too hard.

"For the record," she says, as she writes in it, "none of this is what I went to school for, and I resent being asked to work in ephemeral matters at all. I'll have you know that I'm strictly a corporeal conjurer."

But in the book, she writes, 'Hello, I'm Madeline. I have no idea where I am or how I got here, and I am so incredibly unqualified for any of this. But I will keep digging through wreckage if I'm all you've got for a conjurer.' She stares at the sentence in the book for a few seconds, then motions with her hand as if to flick something at the boy. Then the letters disappear, and he knows a couple new sentences in her language.

He blinks several times in a row, then says, "Hello?" in her language and then something that sounds very foul in another language. Probably "what the fuck" or some such.

She cackles. Sorry, she's so tired, she can't really help it. Cursing is just such a reasonable thing to do in this situation.

"Hello," she repeats back to him. Then she writes and sends, 'I think the words you're looking for are 'what the fuck,' which. Yep. Pretty much. But digging more people out first, yeah?'

"I'm Zei," he says, to get the introductions out of the way, then, "Dig more people out... no? You dig people out... no here?" He gestures in the direction of the beach opposite to where he came from.

"Uh." Okay clearly she needs to give this poor person some better vocabulary.

Write write write. 'Yes, no, maybe, sort of, there aren't any, someone's already gotten them, only a few spots, could you do something else instead for the betterment of human prosperity, and, or, but, I don't have the words for it,' she sends.

"Here," he says, pointing at the ground under his feet. Then he points into the distance and makes a quizzical noise.

'Here, there, everywhere, nowhere,' she writes and then sends, obligingly. Then: 'Is that enough to communicate for now? I'm too tired to be any good at guessing.'

"Have you dug people out from there?" he asks, pointing in the direction she came from. "There aren't any more people there," he says, pointing in the direction he came from. "You... stay here rest," he adds, and those are certainly not words she gave him actually. "I return," then another word that she unaccountably knows means "soon" in his language.

Then without more language stuff he'll go check her work.

"Yes," she answers, to both requests. Then she frowns, confused. Uh? There's a word there she doesn't think she gave him, and how does she understand him meaning 'soon'?

But she does stay, and her work was pretty thorough. She can apparently move very heavy things, and was systematic.

So he goes through the beach, probably using magic somehow to check on her work, and returns satisfied that she hasn't missed anyone.

He bows to her and extends both hands out then spirals them in into a circle shape close to his chest while leaning down. He straightens up and says, "Thank you," or maybe something else but it's in his language and once again she's pretty sure she knows what he means.

"You're welcome. And thank you too," she says, out loud, still looking puzzled. "Uh, are you getting... extra language bits? Because I'm getting... some of yours and it's very confusing."

"...yes?" he says in her language then nods. "Yes."

"... Okay but how! This should be only going one way and not very well at that, I purposefully avoided going into translation because it's incredibly tedious!"

"Not enough words to communicate," he says, shrugging. "I have... something to do. For the betterment of... people."

He sure is getting new words here although he seems limited somehow to things similar to what she said.

"Yeah sure go benefit sapient and sentient prosperity, I'm all good with that I'm just so confused what is going on!" she half wails.

Her cat has, by this point, cleaned most of one hand, and headbutts said hand. Madeline blinks at the cat, and then commences with scritches.

He says something else in his language while miming her getting up and walking with him towards the rest of the military installations further into the beach.

"And now I'm not getting anything from your end at all! How did I get anything from you in the first place! That's not how this works I'm so confused! I'm sorry I'll stop wailing I swear it's just this makes no sense."

But she does stand up. She leans down to pick up her cat, who disappears rather than tolerate the indignity of being properly carried. Madeline sighs and then gets to following Zei.

"Sorry," he says in—yeah that's his language again. Also it's a pretty long word or phrase so maybe it's just roughly sorry rather than actually sorry.

Onwards.