Merrin is currently somewhere in the seventeenth hour of a training scenario. 

(It's a her-personalized training scenario, of course, for most people it wouldn't be useful or educational at all to keep going at this point.) 

It's otherwise very routine - for her, at least - all the deviations and exceptions are ones she's by now thoroughly familiar with. At one point her live access to the prediction market updates went down for almost 16 minutes, which was mean, but not the surprising kind of mean. 

It's hard work and she's pushing herself to her limits, but not past them, because that's something you learn less from - 

- except that now she's running around a corner and instead of another casualty to triage there's a GIANT SNAKE with a mirror for a head or maybe a mirror in its jaws she can't tell there isn't enough time to look because now it's EATING HER and this is so far outside anything she's ever trained for or read about or even heard about in some vague pop-culture-by-osmosis cafeteria conversation - 

And now she's lying at an angle on something uneven and looking up at a sky dotted with clouds? 

She should NOT be hallucinating! Merrin is aware that this is a phenomenon that can happen, after sufficient sleep deprivation, but she's only in hour seventeen which means she's been awake for nineteen hours, which shouldn't be enough period, and in her case specifically she's pushed it a lot further than that and the worst she's ever experienced was halos around lights and closed-eye hypnagogic imagery of weird mutating faces (which makes perfect sense given the mechanisms of the human visual cortex.) 

This...just feels real? 

Merrin sits up, and looks around, and thinks to herself that it's fair enough for her trainers to throw something new at her but she's still going to be complaining so loudly later. 

Belrun, Queen of Valdemar, was having a COMPLETELY ORDINARY MORNING when a Changecreature came out of fucking nowhere and launched itself at her while she was brushing out her hair and looking at her overnight report. She is standing on this hill in her slippers and Whites, holding a hairbrush still lodged in her hair, for about half a second before she fails to adjust for the ground beneath her no longer being flat and sits down suddenly, crushing some buttercups.

Also both her soul accessories are FAR AWAY SO SO SO FAR AWAY. Not as bad as when Leareth was being dead but there's - more of it, since it's Amshalan too.

Merrin, who for reasons of extensive practice if not native skill is very quick at regaining her feet, manages to scramble up and twist around and sees - a young woman, about the same age as her, sitting down on the hillside with - something? - in her hand. Looking just as startled as Merrin feels. 

"Status report* -" she starts.

She finishes noticing and processing the slippers and the completely unfamiliar clothing, and the general air of upset confusion. "....Or, sorry, are you - hurt? Where are we?" 

She is speaking a completely unfamiliar language. 

*dath ilan idiom, specific for rapid communication between trained Exception Handlers who have not previously met and may not have the same specific training but can be assumed to follow the broader expected protocols. 

"I speak Valdemaran, and also Rethwellani," says Belrun, switching languages at the comma. And she moooostly has the hang of not reading non-mindspeaking people's minds when she Mindspeaks them but it's worth checking if this person can just talk to her.

Merrin did not understand that. Or even slightly recognize any of the phoneme clusters. 

- is this a conlang she's never heard of before? Obviously no one would actually not understand Baseline but it's not totally unimaginable for her training scenario to involve a hypothetical where someone doesn't - though they didn't warn her that this particular session would be rated to anywhere near that level of difficulty, and it's weird, really, to just throw that in along with the snake-eating bit after seventeen hours - 

Pause. Actually she's...much less sure how the snake part fits into this. 

...Which means that maybe none of this is real? Merrin is noticing herself struggling with the fact that she really doesn't want it to be the case that she can sometimes start hallucinating after just seventeen hours of fairly routine work. She flags that, and then turns back to the other woman, because it's still the case that she's in a place with another person who might be injured. 

"I don't understand you," she says, and accompanies this with a hand cupped to her ear and some apologetic gestures that she hopes will convey this nonverbally. 

Yeah that was kind of a long shot. :Can you understand this?:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH all right she is definitely hallucinating because she did understand that but it was a voice directly in her head. 

"....Tsi-imbi," Merrin says, somewhat hesitantly, but clearly, and very much desperately hoping that nothing happens as a result because it would be incredibly embarrassing, except she knows that's a pointless thought to have and really it should be a relief for someone who actually understands what's happening here to step in and take over - 

Belrun does not herself have a word for "I think I'm having experiences inconsistent with consensus reality and would like to be hospitalized about it" but fortunately this is a nonverbal medium, after a fashion! :I'm not a Mindhealer so I can't do much about it if you've gone mad. Have you never met a Mindspeaker before? I think we're less common outside Valdemar:

???????????????? 

"I don't recognize several of those concepts including the place you mentioned?" Merrin manages finally. (Out loud, because this feels easier, though she also tries to think it as clearly as she can because 'telepathic communicator' is one of the concepts that did make it across - it's not something that actually exists, as far as she knows, but it's come up at all in the limited selection of fiction that she's had time to read and the slightly broader selection that she's heard about from friends and acquaintances.) 

"- Are you injured or do you know of any nearby medical emergencies?" she adds, after a moment and almost hopefully, because this is clearly well beyond anything as sensical as a training scenario but at least she would know what to do for that. She's perfectly functional for responding to an emergency in any of the fairly broad domains in which she's trained and she's way too tired for complicated original thinking. 

:No and no:

"- Oh, good." This followed up by an almost-equally-loud mental addition of 'I guess', because obviously holding everything else equal, someone being injured is worse, but the lack of it is still additional (mostly unnecessary) evidence that she's not in a bizarrely expensive complicated training scenario and is instead just, actually, for real, in....whatever this is. Which she has no workable theory for, yet. 

"...What I just experienced was being eaten by a snake," she says, in case the woman she's talking to has more information. "Not a - normal biological snake, I think, it - had a mirror where its head should be. And then I was here. Do you know where we are right now." 

:I don't know at all, no. I had the snake thing too, it looked like this,: mental image of the snake. :I don't know where we are but I'm pretty sure I'm at least not on the same continent I was before: BECAUSE THEY ARE SO FAR AWAYYYYYY

Merrin is starting to quietly give up on the possibility that this is anything as legible as a training scenario. (Or, well, there's any mental kicking-and-screaming going on, in the background, but it's muted kicking and screaming, she has professional dignity and it may not be something she's trained for this context but it's not obviously not applicable here.) 

"I don't know where we are either." She's going to keep speaking out loud while also thinking loudly, even if this doesn't add anything, because it seems to help slightly with combating the feeling like she's insane and thus shouldn't be doing or thinking anything until someone non-insane takes over. "I don't think there should be anywhere in Civilization where a randomly selected person wouldn't speak Baseline." (The language she's speaking right now; also, clearly in her thoughts, the universal language spoken across her entire planet.) "The - snake creature - shouldn't have been where it was and doesn't make sense to me, and ending up in an unrecognizable wilderness afterward makes less sense than that." 

Pause. 

"- I don't have any communications-devices on me because I was in a training scenario where I wasn't supposed to have a portable one. Do you?" 

:Nope! I normally wear a bunch of artifacts because I have a very paranoid and protective husband but I was still getting dressed, don't wear most of them in my sleep, and am lucky I have clothes on at all! I am not from a planet with a monolingual civilization that covers the whole thing:

Merrin is managing to follow most of that and note down all the pieces in working memory but she is kind of only processing half of it. At best. 

...For the sake of simplicity and her ability to make any decisions whatsoever in real time, she is going to temporarily assume that she's in...some sort of television fiction? She's not sure what genre. It doesn't match anything she's especially familiar with, yet. 

"- You're married?" she says after a few beats. She's briefly tempted to say something in the genre of 'congratulations' except she has no idea if it's a recent marriage or if the woman's culture does partnership-congratulations or, in general, if that sentiment would be at all appropriate. (The concept for 'husband' that's coming across via the telepathy also doesn't exactly match any gendertrope-partnership that Merrin recognizes, but - you would expect that, right, another world, where people have telepathy and other mysterious Mental Powers and also mysteriously haven't coordinated on a single language...)

"Your husband, is he - going to be looking for you?" 

:Yes, but it could easily take him weeks, maybe even longer, I have no idea how difficult it is to manage a gate to wherever here is:

"A...what?" 

The telepathy did actually convey a concept, not just a word - a Gate is...some kind of direct temporary portal between two places? This doesn't really leave Merrin with fewer questions, though. 

:You have the right idea. It's magic, but more advanced than I have down yet even in very basic form:

Merrin nods. "But you can do, um, other kinds of 'magic'? - I guess obviously you can, there's the telepathy. Can you do anything else that would be helpful in this situation?" Merrin isn't sure what; she's wildly guessing at what a kind of 'magic' that does portals and also telepathy might also be able to do. Light fires? Provide shelter? 

:I can do lights and fires and shields and clean any water we find and if wildlife attacks us I could try zapping it with a levinbolt but would probably be better off Fetching it, I've spent longer with Fetching. And Healing, which I also have, and Farsight, which is new but not that difficult to learn how to use:

"Oh. Good. We're - better off than I'd worried, then. I really only have medical supplies." And not a full load, even, she had already used up most of the consumables at that point in the scenario. 

...If they're going to be stuck here together until they figure out where they are, she should do introductions. "I'm Merrin, by the way. I'm from a place called dath ilan. We don't have magic." 

"Belrun," says Belrun aloud, and :our world's called Velgarth.:

Nod. "Belrun," Merrin repeats. She's looking around again. "- We should go see if the building is open and if anyone's there. Hopefully someone will be able to tell us where we are. Or at the very least we can see if there's food there. I don't have any on me."