A young lady with bark ridges down the backs of her hands is darning a pair of thick woollen tights next to the bed; she notices Lenora waking and smiles in her general direction. "Feeling any better? Anything I can get for you?"

She peers at the bark ridges, trying to determine if they're tattoos. "Good... Night? Oh wow, the rose stuff and vervain - or whatever it is, I wasn't up to memorizing things - is pretty amazing. My medical chip thinks I'll definitely recover without any more now, but also more wouldn't be amiss. I think I'm up to stretching my legs a bit. You're supposed to do that in recovery if you can anyway, I think."

Nope, they seem to be bark growing out of her skin, like it's some kind of weird scab.

In fact, if she's thinking about it now, quite a few of the people she's seen have had something like that - bark scabs in odd places, prominent green veins...

"Yup, it's been dark for a while out there, not that it's easy to tell. I think you had some True Vervain on the spot in the crater, then a spot of Tom Drake's Tea when we had some on for the fighting practice, then some Roseweald off Davyn. If you're doing okay, I'd probably want to talk to a physick or at least get Allegra to recite what the one down from First Glade said before giving you anything else, right now. Happy to help you out of bed for a wander, though - how's your night vision?"

"Okay, huh. The vines and bark... We both have weird stuff to the other going on. I've got a sensor set integrated so I'll be fine going to the outhouse at least. No need to wake anyone up for that now."

"You really do have all the best toys." The woman seemed somewhat suspicious and defensive when Lenora mentioned the vines and bark, but doesn't seem to want to make anything of it if she doesn't. "Need a hand or shall I just get out of your way and get the door?"

And they can proceed over to the outhouses, which are actually relatively clean and pleasant long-drop composting toilets in cute individual wooden sheds, with seats of polished and waxed wood. The village is much quieter at night, but there are bobbing lightstones being carried here and there by a couple of people still out and about.

The low tech continues. She absentmindedly tries to check social media thrice. "I don't know if mentioning that is offensive or anything. I'm not from around here, yanno. Shutting up."

"If you're not going to be funny about it, it's fine to ask; it's just we mostly came here to get away from all that, you know. Or maybe you don't know? That's, quite refreshing actually."

"I think I can guess. Some people really really don't like it and it's a big messy thing. And it might not even be something one chooses."

"Yeah, you've about got it. You see, humans come in, I don't know what you want to call them, I think the proper word is 'lineages' but I like to think of them as, flavours? Do you know the realms of magic? Spring, summer, autumn, winter, day, night; we can be, like, 'touched' by any of these, and when it's Spring it happens like this," she waves her hand absently, "and we're called Briars. Amongst a lot of other, less kind things. People round here and hereabouts tend to get a bit superstitious about it, because the Vallorn's Spring magic, and uncontrolled plants in fields and stuff."

"I don't know the realms of magic. I'm from a different planet and possibly universe. We do have all natural racism and sexism though."

And then she can have a relatively normal sleep until morning. It's the third day after her crashing and she's awake and aware.

Brynna is knitting something, which she puts away neatly when she notices Lenora's awake. "Good morning, dearie. Would you like a spot of breakfast? We've got everything we had yesterday and there's some oatmeal ready to go, and several kinds of honey."

"Oatmeal sounds very good actually! Thank you. I hope there's something I can do to pay y'all back."

"Oh, I am very sure that you will find some way to be useful once you've recovered." Brynna bustles into the other room to ladle a bowl of hot oatmeal porridge from the pot on the iron stove. She hands it and a wooden spoon over. "Honey, dried fruit, little bits of bacon?" she offers. "And if you're determined to start paying back, I can go and see if Allegra's awake, I'm sure she is absolutely full of questions."

"I can answer some questions, sure. I have plenty of my own. I'd be trying to go home, but- It's not like I understand what I did to get here."

"Well, if anyone round here can understand it, it'll be Allegra."

Brynna leaves Lenora to her breakfast and shortly returns with Allegra in tow.

"Hi, again," says Allegra, leaning a staff with silver vines and autumnal leaves growing up it against the wall with the spears. "Brynna tells me that you're a bit more with it this morning?" 

"Hi! Yeah, should I just infodump at you a bit?"

"That sounds great, dump away," replies Allegra, and she gets out a small notebook bound in what looks like quite nice patterned silk and a somewhat chewed looking wood and graphite pencil, and takes a seat in the chairs the volunteers have been using so she can rest the notebook on her satchel bag. 

"The planet I'm from has things like electricity and fabricators that can make most material objects autonomously. There's billions of us. Life would be pretty great except for how an alien species has created - some sort of dimensional portal in various places on the planet, and huge numbers of aliens come out and try to kill all of us. We call them Antagonists, or Ants. I'm a Valkyrie Core user - the cores were invented by studying the aliens in the early days of the war and still aren't especially well understood, but some people have the potential to bind with one. Cores, once you've trained yourself to competence and integrated some technology, are amazingly useful things. What we mostly use them for is not being exterminated. I'm a first year at UNEDC Valkyrie Academy South Pacific. So, not exactly the best candidate here? I was trying to learn a technique called 'wave force', which is a notably advanced technique of impeller field manipulation that can pierce or bypass the enemy's impeller fields. -Impeller fields are weird, they're these curving clouds of energy that can overlap each other and each be controlled independently. By default they're a diffuse sphere but you can make them hollow or shift them to one side or poke them out like a lance. They're the final layer of defense for Valkyrie Core users, if your impeller integrity is low attacks can get through to your actual body. Anyway, Wave Force, invented by one of the greatest fighters in the world to defeat high-power enemy targets, is something to do with the dimensional portals they use but usually people who try it just - fail to do anything? Falling into a rift to somewhere else had never happened before. I was in the general combat wing program, lots of aerial tactics and combat simulator time and stuff like that."

Allegra dutifully scribbles a bunch of notes.

"Well - welcome to what happens hundreds of years later, after you summon enough of those things that they eat your entire civilisation and you have to start pretty much from scratch.

I'm exaggerating a bit here. But you might have heard people talking about the Vallorn? That's basically our Ants. Except they're kind of more malevolent terrain than individual creatures, although they control individual creatures too, and they don't die for good when you just set them on fire or something.

You've landed in Miaren, the one place where we managed to close one of them up - somehow. History has helpfully forgotten how.

Oh, and unfortunately they're not our only problem - the Empire is pretty much surrounded by people who want to kill us and take our stuff for various reasons. We're about as far from that as you can get here, although I still don't advise wandering off too far as we've still got, y'know, wolves and the occasional bandit.

There are places with a bit more in the way of harnessed lightning and automata - actually I originally came from one of them, place called Urizen, up in the mountains where there's enough ambient magic for ushabti.

If anyone can figure out how to get you home, it'll be the Urizeni - but right now they're kind of busy fighting an existential war with the dreadful fucking torturer orcs that border that area - the Druj - and the opportunistic pirate ones who came and decided to camp out on the magically cursed plateau. Which is now awake, good job everyone.

So. Uh. I actually came and founded this Steading to get away from the world's problems and make something good while I can, but it looks like you have dropped in my lap and that's probably important. If I'm not just actually still stuck in Winter Hell and just hallucinating the whole thing."

"Sorry. That was a bit of an infodump too. Did you follow any of that?" 

"Yeesh. I don't think I can just, uh, start shooting bad guys without some due diligence. I signed a code, took an oath. I also don't wanna mess with this haven of peace, if that's what you have here. This 'magic' seems pretty pervasive and important. We think of it like, we don't have magic, it's all just the laws of physics we don't quite understand yet. But I've never heard of winter being more than a weather pattern. Malevolent terrain features do sound like something I should take a look at in case I can make heads or tails of it. Carefully."

"Yes, carefully and probably not right away - the nearest is a bit of a step from here anyway. Flying is probably safest - it does have flying creatures, but generally we don't, so it won't be expecting anyone in the air having a look.

The flying creatures are generally giant insects and I don't _think_ they can get very high - but they ought to collapse on themselves and not be able to breathe, never mind lift off.

If the Urizen hear that you can fly - well, half of them will immediately try to take whatever lets you do that apart to see how it works, and the other half will try to persuade you to scout for them. There's a lot of twisty mountain passes and scouting is especially difficult when getting captured means either gratuitous torture or being sold as a slave into the salt mines. We have some magic for it, but it tends to show generalities over a wide area rather than anything tactically useful.

I don't believe the orcs have anything that can fly at all, but they are actually people, and I understand you should absolutely not take my word for how terrible they are - fortunately you don't have to, because it should be pretty obvious from the air.

...can you take passengers, when you do that? Or replicate any of the technology?"

"I am super not engineering track. Even if I technically have plans for things saved. As for flying, hell yeah. Valkyries rule the skies without enemy air superiority or anti-air. Urizen sounds like a place I should check out too. Any passengers would have one heck of an uncomfortable ride, it's not very practical. Maybe i could just like... Pick up a train car and fly it a short distance? Not trivially."

"I suspect we don't have the relevant infrastructure anyway, although I'm sure the Artisans Guild would love to stare at those plans if we could get them on paper.

I've sent a letter to some old friends in Urizen but even if you have to travel at my pace I'm fairly sure we could outrun it, if you're recovered enough to move. I'd normally take a boat these days, it's been a while since I've done a stupid sprint down the Trods.

I could send you even faster with an actual runner or some vague directions, but I'm kind of worried about what you might fall into without someone along who's at least been to Anvil - that's where we do all our Empire wide politics, four times a year, I've totally lost track of when the next one is."

"Intel~ Saves~ Lives~" She singsongs. "Plus, while I'm awake I do still need more rest, I think? What kind of things does 'magic' do besides nice healing?"

"So. Lots of things. But relevantly: making people stronger and better at things, generally very temporarily; making armies stronger and better at things, few months; raising magic fortifications; getting a general idea of what's going on, on an entire territory level.

Plus, like, cursing people, cursing territories, finding out about stuff that's right in front of you, a whole load of ways to bond people and things into groups, making the crops grow, sending messages.

I'm sure I've missed some kind of huge important category I'm going to feel very embarrassed about. I guess there's all the magic drugs and making you feel things in places that isn't all that useful. Night does a lot of random weird stuff, the one to learn how to make something someone else knows how to make is Night, and Winter has the one we were thinking of using on your shield to break magic items.

There's basically a whole academic study of what magic can and can't do, but if you model it as 'can make something a bit better for a while, or learn about something you can touch or are in control of' that's probably a good start.

Herbs like the ones we used on you are kind of technically not magic, although blatantly they're just a different kind of magic, and have a much more limited range of effects - at least the way we use them, it's what the torturer orcs specialise in - but not the same set of limitations.

I can get you, like, a pile of small books if you want details, or you can ask me specific things."