There is a twist in the air, a tearing sound, and the air and ground ripple oddly, as if vibrating wildly. A glimpse of a hole in the sky, showing black sky and barren desert.

And then a loud crash.

The resulting crater is surrounded by a rippling blue field of energy, flickering in overlapping curved patterns centered on a woman in a sort of body hugging flight suit in the middle of the crater, with a futuristic full-face helmet and various metal panels forming an incomplete suit of armor(?)

There is some quantity of running and screaming, but in general it is quite purposeful running and screaming. Children are whisked swiftly out of harm's way; crystals are dropped into pouches; the group of people who sprint up to Allegra's door are yelling at least moderately coherently, if still somewhat all at once.

A few of the more martially-inclined make a perimeter, in case something exciting comes out of the crater; several chirurgeons pounce on those who were too close, while another seems to be trying to decide whether to just grab through the energy barrier or if he can make a diagnosis at a distance; and one young lady starts casting something on the barrier immediately.

As the crowd of bystanders starts to get more curious than cautious, Allegra makes her way down from her hut and calls out, "Any idea if that thing's dangerous, Carys?" at the magic user.

Repeatedly drawing her magical pattern in the air, hovering her hand right over but not actually _touching_ the magic barrier - these people are trained quite well in caution, although it doesn't necessarily seem to be their instinct and the chirurgeon who wants to get in there and inspect the woman in more detail is positively vibrating with the effort of holding back...

"Not a magic item," reports Carys, "not an enchantment, divination recommends - ugh, Hand of the Maker or Shadowed Glass of Sung."

"Hand's probably interesting but won't tell us what it does unless we're really lucky," replies Allegra. "I don't think we have enough Night in the village. Davyd, how urgent is it to get in there?"

The chirurgeon who was hopping from foot to foot shakes his head. "Too much weird armour, can't tell from here."

Before Allegra can ask for volunteers, one of the fighty types who is standing around the circle takes their spear, turns it round, and starts to poke the field gently and experimentally with the wooden butt.

"You," Allegra points to one of the bystanders, "fetch everyone with a scrap of Winter, they should start casting Words of Ending as soon as possible, I know it's not a magic item but that's our best shot, our visitor might not have much time." Her chosen runner dutifully runs off back into the village.

The barrier deforms like soft gelatin, it feels like pushing the spear handle into water for a moment, before it changes and snaps into something hard and forceful that pushes it away.

The woman in there twitches and groans. "Urgh. Academy, come in academy, something's wrong, I'm injured."

Allegra's attention turns to the woman's voice and she strides forwards to the energy field.

"Can you hear us? If you're injured, Davyd here can help you, but we can't get in the field at the moment. Or I can, if you prefer, although I'm not as in practice as I was. You've landed in Foundhome, in Miaren - the Academy is quite a way off from here, I'm afraid."

Several other people are clearly itching to speak, but don't talk over her for now.

Oh. Emergency responders. Right. It's sort of hard to think in this much pain but you're supposed to power down for emergency responders.

"Roger, no 'peller. Desyncing."

The blue fields retract to the woman and vanish. Shortly after that the weird armor folds away into nowhere in slightly impossible ways, too.

Davyd is on the case immediately; he drops down to a crouch beside her, unrolls a pouch of a very large number of different kinds of moss, appraises her wounds briefly and starts doing... _approximately_ perfectly reasonable first aid, if all of your bandages and antiseptics and so forth were varieties of moss?

Lacking any very specific bleeding or similar to treat, he swabs her over with several kinds of moss, asks her if this hurts a couple of times. It does, but then he applies a different variety of moss and it doesn't quite so much.

Allegra mostly tries to keep the crowd back, with a lot of, "Give her some space," and "Looks like she'll be okay," and "We can do questions when we can move her safely and she's had some rest, if she wants it."

The fighty types look like they are not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved; a couple of them stay on guard, but a spontaneous sparring circle also breaks out.

"Okay," says Davyd at length, looking up at Allegra. "She's not going to die right now. We should be _very_ careful moving her, but can probably get a soft stretcher under if we need to. As for the next couple of weeks - I'm going to run out of Vervain and we need a better physick."

"Right," replies Allegra. "Are you okay down there, mystery visitor, at least unless it starts to threaten rain or anything? We'll get some blankets and send for a better physick."

Davyd attempts to feed her a concoction with bruised leaves in, which smells strongly of... green. "This should make you feel like you can get up, but I don't advise it until we get the expert in to look at you."

"This is all pretty strange. You guys don't look like Perth E-M and there's no radio traffic. But I can sit tight, whatever that is helped with the pain."

"Yes. I think you might have come quite a distance - I don't recognise all the place names you're using. I'm Allegra Foundhome, and this is approximately my village; we're in Goldentrees, in Miaren. Do you recognise any of the following words or places," and she pronounces the following slowly and carefully, "Canterspire, Casinean Empire, Commonwealth, Gemeinsamesprach, Vard, Steinr, schlacta, boyar, volhov?"

A young lad taps her on the shoulder and asks if he should start heading out to the nearest town for a physick; she nods and he runs off towards the track out of town.

"You could have sent a Winged Messenger," opines someone else in the crowd, who have mostly started chattering amongst themselves. Allegra ignores the commentary.

"I recognize a few words but like-

I think I fucked up big time with w- a dangerous technique, and that's gotten me very lost."

"That sounds quite likely. Don't worry - you're probably in the safest place in the Empire. Nothing you need to do but lie back and try to get better."

A couple of the crowd throw skeptical looks at Allegra at this pronouncement, but in general the onlookers seem to be either dispersing or trying to get a closer look at the armour without irritating Allegra.

Allegra doesn't necessarily look like someone from 'the safest place' - the stylised thorny-branches tattoo around her left eye is fairly discreet and matched by similar designs on many of the other people, but the rather larger three lines cascading from a point on her right cheek and the neat, deliberately inflicted burn scar over what looks like a blackened wound on her left cheekbone are a bit more intimidating.

"If you do want to know some things, I'm happy to stand around here and answer questions for a bit; or I can tell everyone to stop pestering you and leave you with a couple of guards and someone to check in on your health."

A few people have turned up with blankets and are using offering blankets as an excuse to get a bit closer and stare curiously. The blankets are all rough woollen affairs, generally haphazardly patched.

She's outside, there's no way this is the safest place. That would be in an arcology far from the frontline. Also, yeah, the low tech and scars. Some people keep scars for style?

She sits up and slowly gets to her feet. "Well. Sorry to show up and be trouble... Med unit's already screaming at me."

"Uhm," Davyd can't help but comment, but looks helplessly at Allegra.

"If you'd like somewhere more comfortable to wait for the physick, we can provide a variety of charming huts with varying amounts of soft furnishings." There is a minor clamour behind her as people attempt to wave and invite the exciting stranger to their house. "True Vervain's great at getting you moving but I've disobeyed enough medic's orders in my life to know it's not the best move, unless you have somewhere you urgently need to be and you actually think you can get there?"

"Oh, yeah, well, the least I can do is get to the infirmary or wherever under my own power. I'm still linked, just not expressing the frame, but I've gotta cut that out in a safe bed a-sap."

The crater's pretty shallow. She scales it with a little flickering of blue to help with her weight. The flight suit is thick and heavy grey cloth, relatively unadorned except for a shoulder patch with a stylized laurel wreathed globe crossed with a sword and the letters UNEDC, an unknown rank badge, and a nametag: Lenora Wilson.

Allegra picks one of the eager volunteers from the crowd, who she knows has a bit of chirurgy, a nice bed, and a spare bed so they're not left sleeping on the floor.

"Brynna, I can see you're trying very hard to volunteer, can you take our visitor and get her settled? I'm afraid I only have one bed and I quite like it."

Brynna is an older lady who is extremely happy to be chosen for this honour and offers an arm in case the casualty would like a nice lean. "Come this way, dearie, I promise you the best bed in the village."

'The best bed in the village' is a few hundred meters away up a slightly twisty path, inside a moss-roofed single-story wooden house which does appear to have been put together with a little more attention to detail than the other ramshackle shelters.

Yeah, this place is very much not an arcology. It doesn't look like they even have electricity. There's certainly no wifi.

"Thank you. Do you have trouble with the Antagonists? Or living out here with no modern technology?"

Allegra follows Brynna as she guides Lenora home, as there are still questions to be answered, but lets the older woman take the lead for now.

"Oh, no, there's no trouble here. Nobody's dumb enough to mess with Allegra and her briars. And you won't get any Vallorn out here, I know we're a Navarr territory but this is Miaren - you might not know, I guess, if you're from foreign parts, but we killed the one here a while back now." Brynna is clearly very proud of this accomplishment, although probably not on a personal level. "As for technology, well, the League like their cities and the Urizen like their spires, but we have all the best bits here," she claims. "No shortage of lightstones and the mana site and trinket forges keep us in whatever we want from Seren - I think you'll like the bed, there's a real silk coverlet!"

There are indeed glowing crystals hanging everywhere inside Brynna's house, as is clearly evident as soon as she opens the door and ushers Lenora inside, pointing out an actually quite sturdy looking (and soft and springy) wooden-framed bed with the promised silk coverlet in a lovely forest green, then holding the door open and smiling at Allegra in case she wants to come in too.

Also in evidence are a couple of spears leaning casually against the wall, a door to a second room which is probably the only other room in the house, and a glazed ceramic bedpan peeking out from under the bed.

"...Yeah, I'm very very lost. See, I'm in training to fight a race of aliens invading the planet, under the United Nations Earth Defense Command. I don't know how I ended up here given that, uh, as far as I knew parallel universes aren't supposed to actually be real things. This place is definitely surprisingly nice for not having the stuff we use to make places nice. Like electricity. And fabbers. I should probably think about this more tomorrow, I can really tell I'm going to conk right out as soon as I unlink. Thanks again, by the way."

She will lay down on the bed still in her flight suit, under the cover, and ask, "Any quick urgent questions before I unlink?"

"We could be a different planet," offers Allegra. "The Steinr came from the stars, after all."

"But don't worry about that now, dear," Brynna insists. "Have a nice rest and all the questions will be there when you wake up."

Allegra nods, and then starts absent-mindedly searching through a satchel bag that she's wearing - making sure her potions are on hand in case 'conk right out' includes 'starts dying again'.

She shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath and desyncs.

She goes immediately still and relaxed, breathing slowly.

There's a small motion under the covers as something that wasn't there a moment ago now is. It's not obvious but neither is it really hidden. A bulge in the flight suit just under her chest as a hard metal ball has suddenly appeared there.

Allegra startles - that is not an expected thing - but Brynna doesn't seem to be startled and indeed the thing doesn't seem to move again, so it's probably not an imminent threat?

She does take a quiet step forwards and start tracing constellations in the air and whispering their names, though. Is _this_ a magic item? That's the only thing she expects to make sense to... to do that?

The small metal sphere does appear to be a magic item. It... Connects with a person, with unclear criteria for connecting, and gives them a manipulatable energy field, and then also connects with/absorbs other things, and helps the person use the other things? That is what a basic detection can tell, at least.

Oh _wow_ they've got something to work around _attunement limits_ by connecting other things to the first thing.

Hopefully they survive long enough to explain how it works.

Allegra smiles enigmatically at Brynna, then leaves the new household to it, practically skipping down the path.

Eventually, the physick from First Voice Glade will show up, and knock on the door, and be quietly let in by Brynna.

She's still unconscious. Less like she's exhausted and asleep, and more like something is keeping her that way.

There's lots and lots of subtle internal damage that has had time to start cascading now. Her kidneys and liver are going to be working overtime. This may or may not be detectable by the locals.

The physick mixes a little of her own blood with some herbs and burns them near the patient, increasingly perturbed at the lack of response. Subtle patterns briefly form in the smoke and disperse.

"Ooookay," she says at length. "So, there's the good news and the bad news."

"The good news?"

"She's extremely healthy, apart from the obvious, and probably not going to die of this, assuming total rest and good care. Definitely not if someone's on standby with Vervain, maybe Roseweald and Bladeroot in case her internals start poisoning her."

"And the bad news?"

"I've never seen damage quite so... extensive. You know that one with writing on the organs? It's like that's happened to every single tiny part of her body, except instead of writing, it's tiny shards of glass? I don't really know how long it's going to take to resolve itself." The physick tries to remember to look concerned instead of fascinated. "Well, it's entirely physical - if you can get a dose of the White Stone, that will fix it right up. Short of that, it might be worth casting Hearthfire Circle if you can - it won't fix everything but it'll relieve the stress on her system until it builds up again." The physick looks thoughtful for a moment. "Because it's just... damage, everywhere... I suspect you might be able to speed it up by... I mean, I wouldn't necessarily recommend..."

"Spit it out," Allegra encourages her.

"Well, you could take off everything that isn't essential and use Blood of the Hydra to regrow it. The damaged bits wouldn't then continually leak into the major organs and they could focus on repairing themselves. But it's not like this is the only option, and that's generally when I'd recommend it - there's always a risk with doing something that drastic, and we don't have to take that risk, because she's safe here."

"I'll let her know when she wakes up," Allegra tells her. "She... is going to wake up, right?"

"Now that's another thing," replies the physick. "She absolutely should have woken up during the moxibustion. Something's keeping her under - but to be honest that's probably the best thing for her, right now. If she hasn't woken up for two days, you'll need to fetch me again because we'll need to do something to get water into her, but until then - someone should turn her over every couple of hours if she isn't shifting position, that's about it."

Allegra thanks the physick for her time (Brynna asks if she'd like a sit down and a nice cup of tea, but the physick is determined to head home before the light fades); sets up a rota of enthusiastic volunteers to watch the interesting stranger for signs that she needs another herb applied; and heads off about her business, for now.

And writes a brief letter to some of her old contacts in Urizen, requesting a visit from someone who can better analyse a magic item and someone with Secrets of Skillful Artiface, just in case; and sends it off with a runner to the wayhouse to be given to a striding.

She wakes up after about 18 hours feeling terrible, and links with her core.

...Her Emu is confused about the treatments they gave her and says she needs a HOSPITAL and should definitely not be expressing anything strenuous for... Two weeks. It's focusing on her head, and will be able to move on to the rest of the body in a day or two. There's some danger of toxic shock, apparently, because of mass cell death, but the Emu thinks the prognosis is decent even without additional support. Wave Force really does not screw around, huh?

She will delicately use her impeller field to get out of bed and use the restroom and drink a lot of water and get something to eat, thanking the kind old lady who helps her with this profusely.