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.

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.

SHE IS SO CONFUSED AND SHE HATES IT.

Madeline simmers in petulant irritation rather than continue to complain aloud about how the world has stopped making any sense. Because they're going in front of other people and she feels like she's going to be isolated enough already, what with the language barrier and being from another world or something, so. Probably their introduction to her shouldn't be 'wailing about things not making sense.' Even though they don't. (And she hates it.)

She is pouting a little, though.

There are more people coming out of shelter, now, and helping each other. The living have been tallied, and thus so have the dead. There are pockets and groups of survivors here and there, chatting or just existing in silence with each other.

As the boy walks back, many of those people lift their heads to look at him as if they've been expecting him.

One man in particular steps forward to greet him with the same bow Zei used to thank Madeline. If Zei's outfit is weird, this man's is just bizarre. His long blue hair is split into three strange long spikes that defy gravity in how they stay up. His robes are thick and heavy, but they are open in front to expose his shoulders, chest, and stomach, and the extensive tattoos covering the latter two. His fingers are longer than most people's, ending in pointed claws, and his abs look like they follow different musculature than usual. Combined with the fact that he seems to be entirely missing his nipples, he is... probably not entirely human.

"Lord Zei," Madeline can understand him say, but the next words are reduced to mere gists and impressions. She is a stranger, and Zei does not know where she came from, but he has positive emotions towards her. That seems to be enough to pacify the man, who bows to her as well.

.... what the hell is up with his hair? What the hell is up with his clothes! The claws and weird musculature are like, fine? But his fashion choices are just bizarre!

No, no, bad Madeline. Try to at least have literally any kind of poker face. Literally any kind.

She bows back to the blatant (bad) anime protagonist, because that's just good manners. And fortunately she wasn't having any 'expressions' anyway so it's... probably fine? It's probably fine.

"Stay here and rest," Zei tells her, echoing himself. "We have time. You..." Man this magic could be more helpful. He says something in his own language and the gist of it seems to involve... her working hard and him thinking well of her for it? Or something?

Okay. Something something thanks for helping save lives, probably, which is fair enough. Lives saved: totally worth the trauma she now definitely has over this whole experience. She nods.

Uh. Well. They seem to be about to be in the middle of something, soooooo. ... Man. All of their buildings got destroyed by the kaiju. Probably people need a place to sleep? Oh man doing architecture sketches and then useful conjuration sounds like the best plan, she's absolutely doing it. It wouldn't work long term without, like, weirdly dedicating her entire life and existence to making sure this one building and its contents stay in place, but hey. Temporary stuff is absolutely in her job description! And then she doesn't have to engage with her trauma! Yay!

'I'm making beds and a place for people to be inside. Number estimate? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 200 300 400 500,' she writes and then sends to helpful healer person. And then says the first part out loud, because she thinks it gets confusing when she's sending the understanding of words on top of understanding that's already there. The numbers are fine, though.

—oh wow that's useful uh let's say "One hundred?"

"Can do!" she says cheerfully, looking downright chipper. Yay!! Something that's actually in her area of expertise!! She's absolutely going to go wander off to look for a spot to put a building! Bye everyone, screw this social stuff!

There's actually a ton of space everywhere she'll be fine.

After a couple of minutes, though, she'll start to hear the sound of drums.

She'll keep half an eye on whatever's going on over there? But mostly she'll be designing a building and its contents. She's ever made conjurations of hotel rooms, this won't even be all that difficult. Foundation first, then she'll work her way up to get a basic floorplan down.

What's going on over there is... peculiar. Although that word may be losing its meaning for Madeline by now. But regardless, Zei and anime hairdo dude have started walking towards the water and... on the water. They are very visibly not sinking. And they have started dancing.

The sounds of drums from before aren't actually coming from anyone playing them, and the song that can now be heard is also not being sung by anyone. And as Zei and the other man dance with each other, twirling around on the water with their staves and coordinating their movements, the song grows. Most of it comes from their direction, but some comes from elsewhere, all around.

Or rather... from the wisps of magic that are starting to appear. Many of them, bits of ethereal flame in white and blue, emerging from the ground or the water or the bodies of the dead. They spiral around the two men in a widening circle, going up and out, until they eventually fly away, towards everywhere else. Some of them disappear into the heavens immediately, but some of them wander before doing so, weaving their way between the growing mass of onlookers or the tents or the machines or the dead. Around Madeline, the wisps of magic pass by and through her work, whispers coming from them and adding to the rising chorus.

This is all over the span of only a couple of minutes. After that, the quantity and volume of those wisps seems to reach a steady level. The air shimmers with their light and their movement, and the whole area is illuminated by them as if inundated by a million ghostly fireflies.

Okay, that's distracting enough to cause her to stop working to stare at them in incomprehension. Uh. Tiny... dancing light wisps. With related music. What... is going on. The wisps are very cute and the music is nice but. No, seriously, what's going on.

(Tempest has come out, and after a pause of staring in confusion at the wisps, gets to trying to catch one. Because of course she does.)

The wisps are incorporeal, and cannot be caught, not that cats really mind that as a rule.

If Madeline pays enough attention to them, she'll notice that the wisps that aren't coming out of actual corpses seem to be coming out of the... blackened dust left by the people who were disintegrated. All of them seem to initially appear where someone died or is dead. And beyond that first couple of minutes the average number of them around stays the same, and the music just repeats itself, growing and shrinking in waves with the moving lights.

... 'Kay.

On reflection, she doesn't have the energy to engage with literally any of that. She's just going to go back to architecture, okay? Okay. What's going on out there no longer matters, because she is required for her unique powers that are coincidentally also holding her together psychologically right now by giving her something useful to do.

So: sort of a hotel! Foundation up! The floorplan is uninspired but functional, if not perhaps up to modern standards. She has no idea how to pull off the plumbing or the kitchen or anything with just conjuration, that's not really the type of stuff she does? The outgoing plumbing is easy enough, she can just steal a bunch of sea water, put it in a little tank on top, and have it rinse out the toilets into the designated poop pit with little levers, but showers are in fact beyond her. Also: there is no elevator, only stairs. But beds are straightforward enough to just directly make without spending several hours fussing over them, which is what would happen if she tried to make functional plumbing. Two queen sized ones in private rooms with lovely windows with closable curtains! One designated sort-of-a-bathroom-but-only-with-a-toilet, in a little room offshoot. With a separate drain in case she gets around to figuring out showers at some point. It's good form to give space for later edits. She'll have the doors lockable from the inside of the suite. It wouldn't keep her out, obviously, but some people might want privacy. If it makes them feel a bit better, why not. It's not like deadbolts are complicated.

Eventually all of the structure complete, she traipses about the place bestowing personality like some kind of demented fairy that is not traumatized even a little. Everything gets color, the floor gets a wood texture and pattern, the walls get tasteful wallpaper, and so on. It'll be a little more sparse than her usual work, and the beds won't all be perfectly at the exact standard queen size, but eh. She doubts there will be any complaints. She mostly just wants to make this nice for people that have kind of had a shit day! They can have less of a shit day. And she can continue not engaging with how much she may or may not be freaking out the minute she runs out of things to do.

The drums and wisps of light are still going steady by the time she's done, and if she steps outside to look she'll still see the two doing their elaborate dance on the surface of the water.

Most of the living have stopped watching them by now, and while no one bothered her during her construction efforts it sure looks like they are very curious about it all. They're keeping a respectful if somewhat wary distance, and the scene is rather surreal, with two entirely different large feats of magic happening at the same time and the uninvolved bystanders just standing around awkwardly waiting for them to end.

Wow, yeah, that is awkward. She... gives a little awkward wave and a small smile?

... She should probably get some food and water or something. She doesn't know how to make that happen and braving the horrible tedium of translation in the interests of caring for her mortal form sounds awful. Instead she's just going to, uh. Make a chair and sit down. Tempest joins her, on her lap.

A couple of minutes later Zei seems to notice her in the middle of his dance, and with a couple of word exchanged with the blue-haired dude he bows away from it (while still looking like it's all part of the same "choreography", so to speak).

He walks towards her, his steps slowly sinking into the water as he does (from their previous "dancing on water" state), and when he does he conspicuously looks up at the building she made and whistles and says something that she is pretty sure means "holy shit" except less religious.

Oh look!! Person she knows! And he can maybe understand a lot of what she says! She can request sustenance for her mortal form without having to brave the horrors of Strangers! Excellent. She had been working up to maybe asking something of one of the others, but it probably would have taken several more minutes of metaphorical hand-wringing.

"Done!" she says, brightly with a smile. "Remember to feed and water your conjurer at least twice a day for best results. ... By which I mean, uh. May I have some water or something?"

Multiple words is good for understanding! He says something that probably means "come with me", especially when paired with the gesture and with how he starts walking away.

Excellent! Except for how she has a cat on her lap and needs to get up and follow someone. Uh.

"Pretty kitty, we've really got to go. Not all of us are familiars, and unlike you, I need to eat. Hup we go."

She makes the attempt to pick up and carry the cat! Predictably, Tempest makes an offended sound and instead opts to disappear. Madeline sighs, because cats, and then follows after Zei.

Some of the people they pass by bow to the boy as they do.

He leads her to a large military tent up a small ramp that was far enough away from the water that it didn't get hit by either the kaiju nor its symbiotes. Close to the entrance flap is a pile of bags, and he goes for the pile from which he fetches one bag in particular, and from within it he gets her a canteen and a small bag filled with dry fruit and nuts.

Madeline trails after the apparent important leadery person, like a duckling. She smiles awkwardly at anyone who bows at him, and anyone that looks at her. Actually, she is probably just stuck on ‘awkward smile showing how incredibly out of her depth she is’ as her default.

Food! Granted, food whose origin she doesn’t recognize, but still. She knows what fruit is, she knows what nuts are, this is all theoretically edible if she ignores the part where she has literally never seen these fruits or nuts in her life. She can just… industriously and systematically nibble on them to form preferences. Conveniently, her preferences are ‘I’m hungry’ and being too tired and overworked to have much in the way of a sense of taste right now. … She does decide that she hates a certain dried fruit that is annoyingly sour, though, and begins avoiding it.

Munch, munch, munch, she should probably attempt social things or something, but. That sounds hard. It’s much easier to just feed and water herself instead, and not do any kind of social tango.

No social tango is fine. There's a place to sit (on a mat on the floor). Zei sits back on his heels and takes some food, himself. He's been working for a while now.