"I see.  I have far better protection from hostile environments than most; I am at this point planning on something in the general vicinity of 'show up to help'.  Have they been able to communicate out?"

"The expedition? They'll have a base camp at the Broch, I expect - I wouldn't expect they'll be in direct communication, but they should have the most up to date news, some of the badly injured may have retreated there. It's the biggest cleared area in Broceliande, with considerable wooden defences around it, I'd expect it to be visible from the air."

"Right."

To Broceliande, then.  She'll set some NBCT suits to cooking, while they're in flight; it's likely they'll be useful if not outright needed.

"The Broch might not be all that pleased with an aerial approach. We could land out of bowshot and walk in, or, hmm - can you make this thing display a banner, prominently? Blue, possibly shot through with gold, with a dolphin on it?

It's a mild deception, claiming the heraldry of Rhianos, but it should get us inside without being shot at, Rhianos won't mind because it's in pursuit of an adventure, and the Navarr won't mind because you're bringing them help and they are intensely practical about that."

"I could, though it feels a bit unnecessarily-deceptive of me.  Here -" Evantia's tablet flicks through several menus in an eyeblink and ends up in a clipart/drawing app, which promptly shows Azure, a dolphin Or - "would this work, or - actually I think I have a heraldry guide somewhere in here that can create images from descriptions."

"Dolphin should be natural colour, probably grey - the gold is just to make the banner look richer and more like it came from a magical realm rather than someone imitating it. If you can set it up to constantly ripple, all the better. I hope your object can draw things from descriptions because I am absolutely not an artist.

We can simply attempt to land, or stand off and walk in, if you prefer; it was merely a thought."

"I'll just drop them a letter before we land or something.  But honestly, if we're doing heraldry, I should probably dust mine off."

"Well.  If it's a common thing.  I don't want to be gauché."

Nonetheless, she has some!

Sable, a roundel per pall azure, vert fimbriated Or, azure, within and conjoined to a crescent bendwise sinister transfixed of a mullet of eight points argent; in bendwise sinister chief a mullet of eight points argent.

Visually,

"...Took me way too long to figure out how to blazon this when I came up with it, but it's pretty, distinctive, and likely conveys a meaning to those who would recognize the perspective my design choice takes, while not being hugely out-of-place in the present.  Or violating tincure!"

"That certainly contained some words.

I think your heraldry is more - formalised? - than ours tends to be?

Nevertheless, that is a distinctive symbol that is hopefully not too easily mistaken; some might think you are invoking the Key and the Lock with the star placement, but that is not too dissimilar to what I have seen of you in any case."

She laughs, "Doesn't it just.  I can only tell you what it means because I worked backwards from the image, honestly."

She'll set it to display.

"...I'm actually surprised your heraldic traditions don't have similar - well, this - or maybe I'd want to ask the Dawnish about that.  Then again part of the problem might be that the language is half French.  Compared to us both seeming to speak my native English for - unknown reasons.

"The Key and the Lock?  I believe there was some mention made of invoking constellations, sometime, but I have to admit I don't recall much else."

"The Imperial language is somewhat bizarrely prevalent on this continent - every nation on the continent speaks it. There are further continents where different languages do exist, and they seem to have a much wider range within a smaller geographical area; there are theories that it was a Terun working to spread their language across the continent.

The Key represents the principle of revelation, and the Lock represents the principle of concealment, or control of access. Neither contains only a single star, but they contain few and are in a similar orientation regarding each other."

"Interesting and oddly apt, indeed."

The Broch, from above, looks like several nearby hamlets went in on a large wooden curtain wall. The buildings are generally low to the ground and wood and thatch; between them, an awful lot of informal encampment has been set up.

There's little in the way of very clear areas inside the wall; the clearest possibilities are a huge wood-pile which would make an awkward landing but is clearly free of people, the central gathering place of each hamlet with a smouldering fire-pit and wooden logs arranged as benches, which have the occasional person milling around, or the main central gathering area where the fire-pit is roaring quite impressively, which has more people but there's generally a little more space.

The wall is well supplied with archers on an internal walkway, and towers with arrow-slits facing both inwards and outwards; many of the inhabitants also appear quite heavily armed. The archers are mostly in greens and browns, whereas the other people are in a wide variety of styles, although green-and-brown and black-and-white with a single highlight colour are the dominant colour schemes.

Outside the curtain wall, the vegetation is flattened and burnt to leave a killing zone, which might theoretically be good for landing. A road suitable for two ox-carts to pass meanders out from the main gate in the wall; there are a few damaged, abandoned carts outside the gate.

Past the flattened zone, the dense jungle closes in immediately - in fact, it seems to be gradually encroaching on the empty space at a visible speed, if still fairly slowly for anything that isn't a plant.

Let's see.  She'll change out of her flightsuit and into her proper armor with an additional CBRN layer; she has countermagic worked into the frame.

She'll slowly bring the plane down in a spiral around the city, to start out with.  If they look like they're going to shoot her, then it's skywriting time - well, more akin to a banner, really, just without the tangibility.

HERE TO HELP STOP VALLORN
DON'T SHOOT, WILL ONLY ANNOY

Anyway, she'll take her cues on what landing site seems appropriate from the locals - she's thinking one of the outlying fire pits, if none arise.

...if it weren't special circumstances, she'd be inclined to just clear a landing spot by setting it on fire, honestly.

Evantia attempts to persuade her device to cause one of those nice S&R armour sets to come into being, noticing that it is Armour Time and their previous armour conversation had gotten a little derailed.

That is fairly easily done!  There's a brief bit of calibration and fitting she needs to do, but she can get the good armor!

"The good armor", in this case, being a suit similar to the one recently donned by the woman calling herself Myra, complete with jump boots, a tractor/pressor/forcefield suite of prodigious strength, a portal gun lifted straight from Aperture Science and its associated effector circuits for more detailed manipulation of objects...

And that's just the technology.

Materials-wise, it's mostly made of the most bullshit mat-sci available; the words 'diamondoid', 'nanotube', and 'superconductor' feature rather prominently, as do precious metals in more generality (for their unreactivity).

And then there is the magic to consider, and this is where the designer has really had room to go all out - there's probably ten thousand runes worked into this, most serving a protective function, some augmenting the other gear (and the suit's overall lifetime) - let alone the spells woven into thread and wrapped around the wearer, redundantly protecting them from all sorts of ills.

The archers on the walls certainly start tracking the vessel with their bows as soon as it's in sight; some sentries are starting to run around in an excitable fashion, a rather primitive-looking spyglass is fetched to point at it from one of the towers.

Nobody is certainly shooting yet, but it would only take someone getting twitchy to set the whole lot of them off. Plus, someone appears to be starting to herd a group of people in either no armour or fancy but less practical leather armour pieces into a circle, which currently looks more like a large argument than a ritual but is certainly the kind of thing that might turn into a ritual at any moment.

The sky writing does not seem to make anyone especially happier; the number of people with spears and serious expressions outside of the buildings considerably increases, the number of random wandering civilians decreases slightly.

Eventually a couple dozen spear-wielders (who, on closer inspection, don't look all that confident with their weapons and mostly look either injured, very young, or very old; to a lesser extent this also applies to the archers, although not so much to the magic users) head out of the gate and start meaningfully standing around in a vaguely oval shape in the area where the road crosses the dead area.

Evantia tries to strike a balance between 'desperately wanting to play with all of the functions of her armour' and 'not wanting to set off anything loud or inconvenient inside a flying vessel'.

"Comms check, Evantia, can you hear me?  There's a somatic gesture to activate your comm if you're having trouble with the BCI; hold either hand to the side of your face, pinkie and thumb extended to your mouth and ear respectively, to turn it on.  I've put your suit in tutorial mode for now; active effects will be locked down unless you confirm verbally.  It'll prompt you."

She'll take that hint, and land where indicated.

A young man with some interesting labyrinthine facial markings - as well as one of the ubiquitous tattoos, a basic thorned vine down one cheek - seems to be in charge here. He can't be more than sixteen years old, but he holds his spear like he knows what to do with it, and his hardened leather armour fits well and is generously covered in tooled vine patterns.

He quickly locates what looks most like the hatch of the vehicle, in order to step forwards in front of it to receive whoever emerges.

"...It's always the little things; would you recommend I head out first or you head out first, Evantia?  Culturally speaking."

"Probably you; I'd be something of a disappointment."

Then she will lead, hopping out of the airplane and muttering something arcane as she sets up a couple drones and security on the road.  Is this road strange to her magic-sense?  She's kind of expecting it to be.

"Hello; my apologies for the, well, scare, but it's not like I could have sent a proper message any faster than I sent myself.  You may call me Administrator Myra Northwind, if we're being formal; otherwise just Myra or Ms. Northwind will do; I'm not one to stand on ceremony, especially on the battlefront.  ...Would any of you like to receive medical attention?  Speaking of battlefront topics."  This, she addresses to the injured amongst the crowd.  "And yes, that goes for those amongst you who are 'only' suffering from age, too.  I rather prefer people to be able to pursue the lives they wish to live with vigor, rather than curse their failing flesh for getting in the way.

"But that's not why I'm actually here - though I will certainly arrange to provide such services on an ongoing basis regardless.  I'm here because I'm hoping I can, to put it crudely, kick the vallorns' asses by being magically bullshit at them til they can't continue to assert their bodyjacking bullshit, and if anyone's going to have useful advice on how to do that effectively, it's you-all."

The road right here is not, in fact, magic; it joins the magic road a little further into the trees, which extends away in two directions, this being a minor spur off it.

One of the younger Thorns experimentally attempts to poke a drone with a spear, not very hard, before being pulled swiftly away by others regardless of the response.

"Keevan Foxden. We do have some people who could actually use medical attention inside, especially if you can do anything for Green Lung." He makes a stand-down gesture at the rest of the fighters. "We don't have very much space inside the wall, will your - whatever it is - be okay out here? Ideally a bit to the side, so anyone running a hand-cart down the road can still get in.

If you're here to do magic, I'll take you to Caryn Splitroot, she's organising the mages."

Nobody addresses the 'suffering from age' comment, although it attracts some funny looks and a little interest from one of the older women.

The drone swivels to give him a Look with its beady frontal cameras, but just sort of backs away from the poke.

"Yeah, I've got defenses to spare; honestly, the only reason I'm not going full 'burn it' on the perimeter as we speak is because I know there's people out in the middle of one of these that would be negatively affected by setting the vallorn off right now.

"Can't say I have certainty on treating Green Lung, as I don't know the specific etiology, but I have confidence that I'll be able to do something worth doing about it.  Let me just..."

Duck back into the plane, hop it a bit off to the side of the road, haul some arcane devices out on hovering platforms (along with more security drones and probably Evantia), look back and forth between the trod and the town for a second, walk confidently to the trod with a crystal on a big metal spike that's etched with runes and -- get interrupted before she can set it up.