"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."

"What are curses like? Is there, like, mind control, because I don't think my ECM covers mind control."

"Depends how you define mind control - it's one of the theoretical limits of magic that it can't do that, but there are auras that make you _feel_ things, and curses can be even more detailed.

Most curses are, like, your skin starts falling off or you feel constantly cold and hungry, but there's also the one that makes it intolerable to do what you're told - that's a terrible nuisance because it wins against most things that suppress other curses - and they're probably one of the most popular things to get very specific on, like one gentleman was cursed to hear awful things every time he saw a potato.

You could probably dodge most curses though - to put a curse on a person you have to get close enough to touch them, then pronounce it - and if you don't stick it on someone, it rebounds onto you.

Auras... Hmm, I don't actually know how high up a consecration goes, or the Druj miasma - that sounds like something interesting to find out - but you can just leave the area and they stop.

If you like, I can stick a personal aura on you that you can use to shake off anything else - but you're stuck with the effects of that aura. I normally give out the Strength of Pride - that just makes you really keen to keep your word, which is one of the more harmless side effects.

Oh, uh, I should possibly be being a bit less irreverent about it - the virtue auras aren't quite magic, more like religion, and some people would take it badly if I suggested any of the true virtue auras were _harmful_. Being able to do this technically makes me a priest. In fact I think Brynna is going to tell me off about this whole introduction, and you should probably get any spiritual instruction you might want from her rather than me..."

Brynna gives Allegra the kind of tolerant smile that suggests she's totally correct in her assessment but that Brynna doesn't intend to start a fight in front of the guest.

"I'll pass." And look for ways to verify later. "Hmm. What else..."

"What else you need to be oriented on depends on what you want to do? I can happily go on at length about basically any aspect of our world for a while yet, but you might want to see some evidence or ask me for some paper or tell me to go away and let you think?

The immediate vicinity of the village is pretty safe, down to the creek and back; the whole area out for over ten miles in any direction is unlikely to be dangerous beyond wild animals, although you might want someone with you to warn off any eager sentries with a bow, if you want to stretch your legs. Or wings. Or whatever you fly with."

"With the impeller field and jet thrusters. Yeah it's pretty hard to orient. I don't need paper, though. Some mindless heavy lifting might be good if you have any."

"That is something we're pretty well supplied with, but the firewood crew might be interested. Brynna?"

"Alfwyn always sleeps late, I can introduce you and he can take you into the forest to catch up with the others. Or you can stand by the spring-head and see if you can make someone's day who doesn't feel like carrying water right now? And there might be a wagon through later, they won't mind a hand loading and unloading."

"Ooh, some tech I might actually know! There's, like- It's an emergency refugee camp package, technically, but anyway, what's the spring-head? Maybe I can improve it."

"Uh, it's where the fresh water that feeds the creek comes out of the ground. Unfortunately whilst I'd love to improve it, I'm a bit wary of tampering with the magical properties of the resulting stream. If you're desperate to improve the water situation, how's your well digging? I can show you where is safely downstream of the mana site, and you can improve that to your heart's content."

"Yeah yeah yeah, I've got like, a survival kit in wherever all the core's stuff goes, it has a hyper specific fabber that only does a couple of things but was easier to integrate, I was thinking like- Some pipe and a spigot pump or maybe a little waterwheel made out of plastic that lifts water up for ya. They do make us take some math and science, and the core helps a lot with that kinda thing too, I'm just not going to be making computers or replacement Jay-Threes or Spikes or any other fancy munitions soon."

"Some other places could use that a lot more than us - you'd be a hit over in Ossium, they're trying to reclaim usable land from a horrible poisonous swamp - but it sounds good and I can show you where you can work without disturbing anything important."

At the conclusion of breakfast, or sooner if she wants to bring her bowl, Allegra will show her down to a patch of woods just outside the village and downstream of where she landed, where the bluebells stop growing in quite such profusion.

"Basically, if it isn't covered in bluebells, you're out of the magic area and shouldn't be causing any problems. Feel free to drop any trees that are in your way, we do not have a tree shortage. Are you happy to draw a crowd or should I warn people off?"

She will walk with breakfast in hand.

"Oh, I like being helpful. Can hardly stand sitting still sometimes and you all gave me those magic herbs. I might want one when I leave - not that its not nice here - just in case, you know? Anyway I don't mind but I might be moving heavy things around, they could fall on someone I guess? If I get a pump working, think I could like, bury a pipe that leads uphill for a water tap? I could just leave it exposed but it's a lot easier to break then."