Sigh. 

"I can cope, I think. It's - a different kind of hard than I've dealt with before but I do know how to handle things that are hard. It's just...frustrating, I guess. Feeling like - something is clearly wrong, and I could be contributing ideas to fix it, but I can't talk to anyone about it." She shakes her head a little, as though to toss all of that aside. "Anyway. How was your day at work?" 

"It was good. Dagny is excited to meet you once you've had a bit of time to get on your feet."

"I'm looking forward to meeting her! It sounds like you, um, work well with her, so - I'm guessing she's easier to talk with about...things like what we've just been talking about." 

"Absolutely. She's brilliant. More than that. She never stops thinking."

"I'm so glad you know her. I - can scarcely imagine trying to figure this world out if I'd met anyone other than you at the start." 

"I'm glad I could help." There's something he wants to add to that, about the specific way he's glad to be able to help her. It's about who he is and who she is, it's something like it being nice to feel needed but completely different, people need him constantly and it's exhausting, and when Merrin is set up with everything and doesn't need him anymore that will be great. It's partly being needed for something, not just patching problems but actually helping with something that will be better after his intervention than it ever was before. He can't quite grab hold of it and put it into words, so he just smiles more genuinely than he has about anything at work in the last week.

Merrin smiles back, though it's a more complicated smile. She's so tired, and she's lonely; she misses home, she misses the comfortable routine and having a roadmap of her future and a plan and knowing that the entirety of Civilization stands behind her - that her life matters and her work matters and she's accomplishing something of real value but the structure is there, all around her, to catch her if she falls. 

She might never have that again. 

She's not at all sure that she knows how to exist, as a person in the world, without having that. Oh, she seems to have brought along enough fragments that she can pick her way through diagnosing problems and planning solutions - it's actually easier, to frame the mysterious underlying wrongness all around them as a very weird kind of patient - and she can keep going, probably, one step at a time, she knows how not to give up in the face of a challenge that feels too hard. She's practiced that. She just hasn't trained for the scenario where that's all there is, just a world shambling along through a confused broken barely-functional routine, full of people who seem to lack the vocabulary to talk about the wrongness, and even the concept that one might want to have words for this - 

- but with Eddie, and especially when Eddie talks about Dagny, she feels slightly less utterly alone. 

She doesn't know how to say most of that either; it seems a lot harder to convey in English. And she doesn't feel right making Eddie responsible for consoling her about what she's lost, when so much of it is something he's never had at all. 

Eddie has nothing at the intersection of comforting, true, and meaningful, but he can give advice on getting an apartment and how to keep in touch with him once she's moved and when Dagny is going to be able to clear a big enough block in her schedule to talk about everything she expects to want to talk about.

Merrin very much appreciates some more step-by-step instructions on how to apartment-hunt and obtain a phone line and cause herself to have a bank account despite her complete lack of legal documentation for her existence. 

She doesn't mind waiting for Dagny to be available. Or, well, she kind of does, but that's her responsibility, and her work at the hospital is probably providing important value and thus worth the general suffering. It's occasionally rewarding, but mostly she feels like a part in some machine of the kind that might have been engineered by five-year-olds whose ambition and desire to show off their cleverness and creativity wildly outstripped their skill or access to components, and she's crammed in somewhere she barely fits, trying to fulfill a purpose well outside her design specs, throwing endless energy into it with only a tiny fraction converted to useful work. 

She's gradually picking up the local social scripts, which reduce the awkwardness and pointless friction but leave her feeling confined to a tighter and tighter box, and she tries to keep it so that only her words and actions are so compressed, and to think her own thoughts behind that mask, but it hurts, and she doesn't think that she's entirely succeeding. It doesn't help that the back-to-back twelve-hour shifts, and her commute and the time it takes to figure out feeding herself with none of the usual conveniences, leave her consistently without enough sleep. She feels slow and stupid and this isn't a new feeling but it's worse when she feels so alone. 

It's only a few more days before Dagny, with Eddie's usual help as the guard-dog of her schedule metaphorically barking at anyone who tries to demand her time for anything less than immensely important, gets an afternoon free and invites Merrin to lunch at one of New York's nicer restaurants. Not one of the most famous or the most ostentatious or the most talked-about, but the tables are widely-spaced and quiet and the windows have a view of the city and the food is delicious, and the waitstaff have a perfect memory for food and a terrible memory for anything else their customers discuss at the table.

Merrin ends up having an argument with the ER manager the night before, over the matter of getting her shift covered so she can actually attend. She eventually resorts to calling a list of the other nurses until she finds someone who's willing to trade it for another shift. 

She sleeps in, and figures out directions to make her way there on the train; she's obtained a map of the city and a train schedule and a guidebook to the incredibly confusing bus and streetcar system. She's been eating almost entirely sandwiches and fruit - apples are the most portable - and she's looking forward to the meal almost as much as she is to the company. 

She arrives exactly on time, wearing her recently handwashed clothing from home; it's still the only clothing she has apart from hospital scrubs, she keeps meaning to go shopping but the other bureaucratic wrangling has taken up all of her free time. 

Dagny is blonde and smiling and wearing clothes that would look out of place in dath ilan but only for aesthetic reasons. If Merrin has picked up on this society's gendertropes while surrounded by people in scrubs, she might be able to tell Dagny is doing a relatively masculine one. 

"Hello. I'm very glad you were able to meet with me. I want to hear everything about your country."

"Hello. I'm very glad you could make time today - I've been looking forward to meeting you ever since Eddie mentioned his work with you. I know you're very busy." 

Merrin has picked up some of the clothing-related gendertrope signals, from patients and families and a little from the doctors (and of course she's spent time on the train and in grocery stores as well.) She can pick up that Dagny is mostly dressed to signal professionalism-and-competence, which seems to be pretty gendered here though it's not obvious to her why it should be. 

...Dagny is also very pretty, and making no effort whatsoever to tone this down for being in public, and - actually it's not entirely or even mostly about her physical appearance, a lot of it is the piercing focus in her eyes. In any case, it's very distracting, which Merrin was not especially mentally prepared for. 

"I, um, what - do you want to hear about first...?" 

"Start with your trains? No, start with your transportation systems. How do you get things from where they are to where they need to be when they need to be there."

Aaaaaaaaaaaah this is a completely unsurprising question and Merrin feels so unqualified to answer it! She's not an engineer or a supply-chain-logistics specialist; she has general knowledge, of course, but if Dagny prods in more detail - which she's certain to - then she's going to run out of answers before they get to a very high level of granularity and then Dagny will be disappointed which her mind thinks is the absolute worst outcome. 

"Um, that's a big question. What scale are you asking about - within-city distances or cross-continent or international? Bulk nonperishable goods or perishable foodstuffs or high-value-per-weight specialized goods?" 

"Cross-continent and let's start with bulk nonperishables."

"Right. Um, I'm really not an expert on the details there, but I think it's usually not air transport, since weight is expensive there and there's less of a speed advantage for nonperishables. It'd depend on the local terrain. I think a lot of transport happens by underground magnetic-powered bullet trains, it's fast and energy-efficient once the infrastructure is there. Obviously the infrastructure development itself is expensive. We've got aboveground skyrail-type trains too, and - roads and trucks, for routes without enough volume for even that setup cost to make sense. And water, for destinations close to a coast, I think especially for really heavy goods that's slower but still less energy-intensive per weight-distance?"

Merrin can talk for a while about this before she hits the limits of her knowledge. 

Dagny is like a very dignified starving child at an all-you-can-eat buffet, methodically shoveling knowledge into herself about not just trains qua trains but also containerization and just-in-time shipping and queueing theory and inventory management and employee performance reviews. She doesn't have the budget for most of the infrastructure work yet, but she sees ways to adapt it piecemeal, and use the profits from that to build even more, because half of accomplishing something is knowing it's possible.

 Merrin has been very useful and would she like to leave the hospital and work for Dagny as a consultant and branch manager? Yes she knows it isn't her field but it's so hard to find good managers and seeing the building projects in action might spark more ideas or let her catch mistakes she's seen before. Obviously Dagny will be sending Merrin a large check for what she's already provided.

Merrin is really glad she's managing to help! 

...A normal dath ilani in her position would probably have asked about the compensation for this before they started talking. Merrin...didn't forget, exactly, but she feels uncomfortable and weird about it. This entire world already has so much less, and - it's not as though any of what she's sharing is her intellectual work. It shouldn't feel wrong - value provided is value provided, and in some sense no one in the entire history of Civilization has worked in isolation, with the credit for their output belonging solely to them and the outcome of solely their own actions and skills and merits - but, Merrin being herself, it does feel kind of wrong. 

She's not going to be stupid about it, though. She thanks Dagny graciously for her offer. 

"I'll...have to think about it," she allows. "What I really wish I could do is find, well, you - your counterpart - in the health care field. I have a lot more specialized knowledge there and I could communicate it more efficiently. I just...don't know where to start, unless you know who I should talk to." She shrugs. "I'll consider it, though, if that's not an option."

She almost wants an excuse to run away from the hospital, before it grinds down all her hopes and confidence and sense of what works and what's right. She doesn't say that out loud. It's - sort of embarrassing, right, it feels as though if she were better, stronger, more stable at the core of herself, then it wouldn't matter who said what or made what faces near her. 

"If I knew who my equivalent in healthcare was, I would tell you. The closest I've heard of is Thomas Hendricks, and he retired years ago. I understand that it may take some time to decide; the offer isn't going anywhere."

"I do have one other question. It's not related to my work; it's a personal project, and if you can tell me anything I'll pay for it separately. Have you ever heard of a machine that can extract static electricity from the air, and turn it into useful current?"

"Have I– what?" Merrin stares at her. "I...don't think so. I'm not an engineer, but - I don't think that should work. To get out more useful energy than you're putting in, I mean. I think that violates thermodynamics - sorry, do you have– I guess you must have that physics concept, if English has a word for it. But anyway, no, I haven't heard of anyone trying to build that, and if someone is claiming to you that they can then they're probably confused somehow." 

Merrin realizes about five seconds after this that she spoke with really quite a lot of confidence, on a question that she is spectacularly unqualified to answer, and she would apologize except that she - kind of just is that confident. It's not exactly a complicated application of her understanding of physical laws. 

"You came from another world, right? It might be possible here and impossible there."

"...I have limited knowledge about physics but I think if this world has, um, stars and planets and liquid water and a whole lot of other physical phenomena - which it must, apparently it has humans in it - then I, I don't think the underlying physical laws can be different. ...Although I guess I'm already confused, since according to the physical laws I understand, it shouldn't have been possible for me to experience dying in a plane crash and waking up here. Or the language thing. So I - don't know. But if it's possible here then something very strange is going on and that - we should try to test it - it would have so many implications if you can violate thermodynamics somehow!" 

She grins. "I found most of a prototype. Want to come see it?"