His fall startled a burst of birds out of the tree, including a handful of crows; he was probably too distracted to notice the odd awareness of their alarm in the few seconds before they got far enough for it to fade away.

His immediate surroundings are unremarkably forested; if he'd been deposited a few feet farther along the cliff he might have had a softer landing in a blueberry bush, but on the other hand if he'd been a few feet in the other direction he might've landed on a tumble of boulders from where the face of the cliff collapsed at some point. Past that, the area is fairly heavily overgrown; there are probably game trails winding between the foliage, it's certainly the right sort of terrain for the type of animals that leave them, but none is immediately in evidence.

Huh. At least the berries are probably edible if he gets stuck here. He spends some time poking his ankle trying to figure out the best way to splint it - a medically trained defense mage could probably do something sensible but he isn't one.

Nothing very much happens for ten or fifteen minutes - the various nearby wildlife resumes going about its business, and he can see birds and squirrels and bugs and things in the nearby foliage; eventually, though, there's a rustling that approaches through the undergrowth.

"Hey, you wouldn't happen to be a force mage, would you?" he says in Hari.

The rustling stops, and after a second a crow flies from that direction to perch overhead.

It regards him, and it's oddly legible that it is regarding him, and then it continues to be oddly clear that it's both surprised that he's a person and concerned about his injuries and about the distress it thinks he's probably in from being lost in someone else's territory. After a second or so it starts being worried that he's not telling it anything, too.

That is a weird thing for him to be imagining but evidently he is imagining a bunch of thoughts and feelings for this random bird to supposedly have. Why is he doing that. He waves cheerfully at the bird that he is imagining thoughts for.

...He can... maybe make a splint that goes on the outside? That would be simpler than a lot of other options and require a lot less gross anatomy knowledge he never picked up.

The bird flits back off toward where the rustling was, and it continues its approach, soon revealing itself to be a young apparently-human man scything his way through the underbrush, followed by a dog harnessed to a small contraption that's probably meant to be a cart, but with six spiderlike legs instead of wheels and a small heap of brush piled on it and two crows perched on top; the man's tunic and scythe and the cart and harness are all a deep forest green, speckled with metallic blue and fading to solid blue at the bottom.

The man stops short when he catches sight of Valanda, and seems (in a mundane way) to be thinking through what he should do; after a moment his body language shifts from frozen-and-thinking to uncomfortable-but-interacting and there's a sense, similar to the sense of what the crow was thinking, that the man assumes Valanda was lost and is now hurt, and needs help, and that he's not very happy with this situation for reasons that he thinks are obvious but of course he'll help anyway. He'd like Valanda to tell him about his injuries, if he can, so he can figure out if it's safe to move him.

"Hi, I fell off a cliff, I don't have rings with me but I do have them..."

The man startles back half a step, confused and alarmed at the noise.

...Okay. He can also not say things. Instead he can turn his sock and also some air into a splint and... not get up because this person is easily startled and he doesn't want to do anything that might come across as aggressive...

If Val can't communicate that's going to make this riskier but that's fine, the newcomer will manage. Val should just wait there for a second... He steps back to the cart and suggests that the crows go see if they can find anything Val had on him that he might have dropped; while they're doing that, he pushes the brush off the cart, recolors and reshapes the platform into an orange seat about the same color as Val's clothes, and reshapes his scythe into a walking stick with several protruding handholds, green from the top to the point where he's holding it fading quickly to Val's orange for the rest of its length.

Getting the cart close to Val is a bit of a process in the narrow space available, but much less difficult than it would be with a wheeled vehicle; the cart goes where it's pushed or pulled, in any direction, stepping nimbly over tree roots and uneven terrain. When it's placed, the man comes around to hold the walking stick for Val and suggest that he try to get into the cart so he can bring him to the medic; there's a sense that he thinks she's quite a good one, though he's still too unsettled to be dwelling on that particularly.

He stares, baffled. There should be wind, for structure magic on that scale. Maybe there's another way to do it - well, obviously there's another way to do it - the cart is probably enchanted to do that on command -

He gets up, wincing, and limps into the cart. He could in fact hide it better but he's somewhere he isn't supposed to be and it's probably strategically better to look visibly hurt right now, and at any rate in a sense it's less dishonest than trying to look like he's fine.

The man relaxes slightly once Val is in the cart, and reshapes the side of it so he won't fall out if it lurches - there's a mild sense that this is out of an abundance of caution, that he's expecting the trip to actually be straightforward.

He pauses for a moment to consider whether to wait for the crows, but decides to head out and he'll get Val's things to him later; he reshapes the stick into a simpler one, colored green and blue again, and starts back down the trail he cut on the way in, with the dog and cart following behind. It's a fairly tight squeeze, but only for a few minutes until they come to a larger trail cobbled with midnight blue stones, which he turns onto without comment - he's looking back every few minutes to make sure Val is all right, but not otherwise trying to interact with him.

The walk to the edge of his territory takes another ten or fifteen minutes, and he points out the marker by the path when they get to it, though the cobbles giving way to plain dirt at the same place make it pretty obvious, too. He's much more relaxed once the cart is safely out, and expects that Val is too - he's never found himself in someone's territory by accident but he can imagine how bad that would be.

Anyway, now that Val is probably comfortable enough to talk - he doesn't recognize him; is he new in the area, or just exploring outside his usual range?

Actually he's less rather than more comfortable now. He assumes it's the crisis having sort of died down, giving him the leeway to really feel his injuries.

He might as well assume the apparent telepathy is real, in the absence of anything else to do, but... how would you do that? It's not illusion magic. It's got to be something else, and the crows have it - the crows are probably people, assuming the telepathy's real, it's people who have magic - but to just assume he can communicate that way - is he supposed to have a knowledge/telepathy dual-enchanted artifact? Also, on the back burner but much more importantly, where is he?

First order of business: demonstrating that he's not an animal, and incidentally demonstrating what he has instead of telepathy. His ponytail has gotten undone somehow at some point; he puts his hair up in a bun that stays put with no visible fastener. And then he mimes writing, in case that helps.

The man stares, briefly, at the bun, before catching himself and looking away - he wasn't aware fleshcrafting could do that! Probably Valanda is on a learning voyage and stopped here to talk to their fleshcrafter; how convenient that that's where he's taking him.

He can pass Val some crafting material to write on, sure. (Hopefully the crows won't have too much trouble finding the supply he was carrying when he fell; he'll look too if they do.) He'll even reshape it into a board and utensil first, and recolor it - grey this time, he does want it back - taking the material from the end of his walking stick.

...Okay, there... isn't actually much chance that people on another planet recognize his alphabet, but presumably they have writing and can recognize the concept, so he writes "do you speak Hari?" sort of on autopilot while thinking of what to draw - this looks like a collection of slightly different crosses and lattices, drawn out longhand like this. And then below that he draws a map of his continent, sketching in the biomes - conical trees up in the north, mountains near the southern coast, and so on, including stylized waves in the ocean around it. He marks Thelm Ret, the town his apartment is in.

...yeah he doesn't recognize that writing system; they use the world library's recommended one around here. Or the map - he assumes it's a map, anyway. Is Val more lost than just ending up in someone's territory? ...uh, in the writing system he knows, yes is like this, and the negation modifier goes around it like this for no.

Oh, convenient. Yes.

Huh, okay. Is he from this general area, or was he traveling and got lost? Or something else, he's not sure how it could be something else but that's best practice in a situation like this, to offer it as an option... the glyph for 'something else' is like this.

Something else.

Uh. Okay... he assumes the goal is to get Val home; will figuring out how he got here help with that, does he think? Or, actually, more importantly, is there an immediate danger involved here?

He has no idea and attempts to convey this with body language.

...more likely yes or more likely no? Or 'not sure' is this glyph, negated.

Not sure.

...He might end up needing to remember a lot of glyphs here. He writes "yes" and "no" and "something else" and "not sure" with short glosses and puts a little box around them to set them off from the content on the page, with room for a couple more in the box.

He's not very happy about that.

Anyway.

Does Val know anything about how they'd go about getting him home that he thinks he'll be able to communicate this way, or should they focus on getting communication working better? Or if he wants to give up and be a hermit about the situation that'd be the obvious third option.