"Hello. I'm Buth. What's your name?"

"I'm River."

"I hear you got here via one of these?" The image is replaced with a photo of a portalsnake.

"Yeah. Thought it was a hallucination."

"They're real. Was anyone near you at the time? They sometimes eat multiple people."

"The rest of the people on my spaceship. Five people at that time. They'd probably try to shoot it but I dunno if that works."

"It can, depending what one shoots it with and where you hit, but sounds like we should assume your crewmates could be in trouble. Can you list them?"

"Malcolm Reynolds, Zoe Alleyne Washburne, Jayne Cobb, Kaywinnet Lee Fry, and Simon Tam. Though Malcolm just goes by Mal and Kaywinnet by Kaylee, if nicknames matter. They're all normal humans."

"Okay, we can get some thop - local magic-bearers - looking for them. Can I send you somebody to collect a mental image of the ship?"

"Sure."

Somebody - not an orc, much more symmetrical, with a long ponytail and a sleek uniform, teleports into the ship. "Hi. I'm Shaut. I can read minds. Can I read yours?"

"Sure."

She's currently hallucinating, but only a little bit, and it's the kind where the edges of her vision blur into weird trippy shapes and colors, not the kind where it overrides her mental abilities. She's constantly mind reading everyone on the ship, people's verbal thoughts only barely distinct from their words and their visual thoughts often overlaying her own vision. She's mostly ignoring her vision, and instead navigating through other people's eyes, which don't have the problem where the world doesn't stay very stable.

She's trying very hard to think of the ship she comes from - she's terribly fond of it, Serenity - and the faces of the people still alive on it, but her memories are fairly jumbled up with a mixture of past-present-future and things she's hallucinated and things she's read off of people's minds, and her brain doesn't really distinguish between those. Still, the memories where people are burning or their faces are melting or the ship is twisting are probably hallucinations, and the stable ones are probably real. (She thinks this, at least.) Her knowledge of the ship isn't just visual, is all of her senses piled on top of each other - and she has some kind of extrasensory perception, and the ship and her friends feel very distinct in this. Her brain doesn't seem sure how to cope with said perception, and keeps randomly flicking it to overlay on other senses, but she's mostly figured out how the overlays work.

She's currently scared but not actually feeling that, and sad and feeling that, and cautiously hopeful but she's not too sure about this trusting governments to do things thing, people trusted the Alliance and look at what that's gotten everyone -

She focuses her mind back on Serenity and her crew.

"- huh. They can probably use that... I might need to come back and try again if they can't."

"Okay."

Shaut disappears. Buth, on the screen, says, "Are there any other emergencies in your world right now?"

"Probably stuff going on all the time, but dunno about specifics. Reavers don't attack too much anymore, but there's a lot of riots we keep hearing about. Not making the news, though, and it usually gets put down fast since no one's uniting. And the Alliance keeps inventing new ways to be shitheads but that's ongoing."

"Okay. Do you need anything?"

"There's some medications I've been trying. They make my brain work clearer. I can skip a dose but shouldn't skip two."

"...when are they next due?"

"Brother usually keeps track of that for me. I think - in the morning ship's time, it was... I think people were mostly considering going to sleep so it was probably ten or twelve hours before that."

"Okay. I'll try to get ahold of your meds by then. Are you getting along with the people you're with or do you want somewhere else to stay?"

"I like them but I dunno they like the mind reading."

"What's the range?"

"Varies. Can't feel normal people on a planet from orbit but I can feel Reavers at that distance. Usually can feel everyone in a city if I'm in it unless it's really really big."

"Are you claustrophobic?"