:I don't either. And if it's empty I can most likely break in for shelter, I suppose: She hauls herself to her feet, wobbly. :This isn't a concern yet, but if I wind up having to do a lot of Gift-use - that's magic but broadly construed - it'll run me down, and if I get very very low, it will be painful or impossible to do Mindspeech, since that's also a Gift. We might want to think about some phrases to learn in each other's languages in case of emergency:

"That's a good idea. I'm not sure how much Gift use is a lot, but we don't know what's likely to come up. Um, I have a tablet for notetaking and it should last a few more days without charging, which there might not be equipment for here. I don't have paper - I guess I could write on bandages but that's sort of a waste of materials that I might need later." She notices the wobbliness. "...Are you all right?" 

:I have bad balance, I'm not hurt and if I fall I can catch myself with Fetching. Normally I get around on a magic horse but she isn't here. I have some paper and a pencil in my pocket but was imagining we'd learn to actually say some phrases. I suppose if your whole planet speaks a single language for some reason you have no idea if you're good or bad at learning new ones?:

"I haven't specifically learned a new language before but I'm going to be below average at it, it - takes me longer than most people to learn new things. I can do it but I usually use flash cards." At least it's not math. Vocabulary is the kind of thing where it's much easier to make up for being a standard deviation or so below median intelligence just by applying twice as much diligence to the problem. 

From Merrin's thoughts, it's very obvious that she thinks of herself as slow, though she's not upset about it; it's a basic fact of her life, it's inconvenient but she's done her best with what she has and it turns out one can get a pretty long way on sheer stubbornness. 

(It's also noticeable, from this angle, that her actual thoughts are not especially slow; she's been thinking ahead through multiple possibilities and considering various plans and contingencies, with a fluency that doesn't quite match Leareth's but hardly anyone can keep up with Leareth on that front, and she's closer to it than most people.) 

:- you don't Thoughtsense like somebody who struggles to think, but maybe there's something specific about picking up new stuff - anyway, I know two languages already, and snippets of more, I can learn some emergency phrases in Baseline:

Huh. Maybe the telepathy is just very low-fidelity at following thoughts, and can't actually distinguish a standard deviation on either side of the median. Weird, though. Merrin isn't going to complain if Belrun is willing to be the one who memorizes some key phrases in a new language. She has enough moving pieces to track already. 

(For one, she's now automatically included in her local-context-model that Belrun's balance problem is a constraint to track and work around, so she's taking the lead on figuring out a path to the building that avoids any uneven ground, and stomping down or kicking aside any plant-life that might present an obstacle.) 

"Right, so I think we should prioritize phrases for communicating information that we can't easily convey with just gestures? So you probably don't have to learn phrases for 'follow me this way' or 'look that way'. ...If we end up in a situation where you're too tired to do telepathy, my guess is that it'll be because something unexpected and probably dangerous happened, so we're likely to need ways to communicate about that. How tiring is the telepathy compared to something you'd use for fighting a wild animal or whatnot - is there any scenario where you'd want to communicate whether or not you're up for doing that, but won't be able to do it telepathically, or should I assume that in that case you're not able to do any magic at all?" 

:Telepathy is lower energy than most things I might need to do in an emergency but it's hard with you because you're not a Mindspeaker at all; I usually don't carry on extended Mindspeech conversations with people who don't have the Gift themselves: because she can just make people Mindspeakers if she wants to :but should still be able to do it unless I'm, say, seriously injured and need to save all my juice for healing myself. Conversely, if I find myself with extra reserves that I don't expect to need till after I have an opportunity to rest and eat, I actually know how to implant Gifts in other people:

"....You can do what?" 

Possibly this should not actually be breaking Merrin's realitymodel more than 'being eaten by a giant snake and ending up in some kind of abandoned nature reserve', or the fact that someone with telepathy exists, but it FEELS a lot more shocking and impossible. 

:I can add Gifts to people! And also animals, that's where I started since I didn't want to be experimenting on people at first. It requires Healing and also mage-gift so I had to do it with my husband at first but now I have mage-gift too and he has Healing so either of us can do it alone. I'm not sure it's likely to come up as a good use of my reserves out here when I might need them to, like, hunt and cook wildlife for us to eat, or something, but for the sake of completeness it would be a way to in the long term reduce the cost of talking to you:

"That's....good to know. But, yeah, probably not an early priority." 

She goes back to thinking about phrases. "We're going to want ways to communicate status for things that aren't visible, so - obvious ones are physical needs or problems that aren't obvious - hopefully we'll already have found food or water, we should prioritize water early on if the building doesn't obviously have it - I hope it has bathrooms - hmm, we might want to communicate about whether a room is safe -" 

She's mostly brainstorming-out-loud, her thoughts moving significantly faster and with more complicated branching than what she's actually saying (and trying to think especially loudly). 

She reaches the building and starts looking for doors. And noting down any windows, since those could be backup entry points if the doors are locked and can't be unlocked easily. Belrun seemed to think she could handle that, presumably with magic? Merrin makes a mental note to get further details on that at some point, and on the magical healing, but she's too distracted to retain all of it if she asks right now. 

The doors are locked. So are the windows. Belrun pauses at a door to touchsight it so she can figure out how to unlock it, and then opens it without a problem.

Merrin watches intently, not that much is visible to her, and then lights up in delight. "Wow! That's incredibly cool. How does that work?" 

:Fetching moves things without touching them, and most people don't know about it but it comes with an extra sense like most Gifts do, and I got pretty good at that part, so I 'felt' around the lock mechanism for something I could move into the unlocked position. It's a more complicated lock than I'm used to but just wanted to have a bolt turned, from the inside:

"Huh. So it's purely mechanical - no electronic parts, I mean? That...probably means this isn't just somewhere remote in dath ilan. Which I already didn't think it was, the architecture isn't a style I recognize." And at the point where one has been eaten by a snake and teleported, it's almost more surprising to end up in another mundane place, instead of something with a more similar level of weirdness. 

It's fairly clear from Merrin's thoughts what 'mechanical' means; there's a lot bundled into the second concept, which is not one that Belrun obviously recognizes, there's a hint of similarity to how Leareth talks about mage-artifacts but Merrin is very clearly thinking of it as non-magical, a physical system analogous to a mechanical lock, but with moving parts at a much smaller scale, and where some of the 'parts' and 'moving' are of - very small-scale lightning? 

:It... might be electronic? It did not require electronic actions to turn from the inside. We don't have electronics where I'm from:

The architectural style: on the outside, it's clad in what appear to be the sliced-off outsides of trees, arranged vertically, like someone wanted to cut out a rectangular prism from the middles of lots of logs and used the outsides for that. The roof is wood-shingled, and steeply pitched, like it needs to slough off snow in the winter. Inside there's a fireplace (empty), the walls on this side are white brick, and the ceiling is vaulted high. There's a lot of leather furniture in shades of brown, chairs and sofas that look like they want to swallow you; there's blue-patterned rugs that are pleasant-looking but don't appear intended to dig your toes into so much as to prevent you from slipping on the tile floor and be easily washed. There's art, hung from protrusions in the brickwork, also mostly in blue, mostly abstract. There's a wraparound desk enclosing a corner, and a staircase opposite an elevator visible in another corner.

Merrin steps inside ahead of Belrun and quickly scans the room, first a rapid pass for any signs of movement or people (nope), then a closer examination for anything resembling electric lights, and any kind of wall-mounted panels or buttons or switches that might be meant as controls for those. The appearance is of is fairly low-tech but the lock was complicated, so her guess is that it's an artistic choice and may not reflect the rest of this Civilization.

Which she continues to think is almost certainly not her own, because nothing is laid out in the expected places and it leaves her feeling vaguely disoriented, and even a place deliberately going for an aesthetic like this would still be aiming to be user-friendly. 

While she's looking around, is there any sign of materials intended for burning in the fireplace? (Merrin is not especially looking for wood logs; if someone wants to deliberately go for a fireplace vibe, there are other options that are much more compatible with human lung health.) 

There are electric lights up in the ceiling! There are no obvious switches controlling them at standing-on-the-floor level, but close inspection will reveal that there are switches up by the rafters. Belrun's peering behind the desk, and then up the stairs.

Merrin is not that tall! How is she supposed to access the switches? Are they deliberately out of reach because they're not supposed to be used? 

"Do you see anything informative-to-you about where we are?" she asks Belrun, hopefully, while she heads over to examine the elevator and try to determine if it's in working order and if so how to operate it. It seems like that - and whether the electric lights are working - would be a helpful indication of whether this place is permanently abandoned or just temporarily uninhabited. 

:Not at all. I don't know what some of this even is - do you know what that thing is? There's a tiny room behind the metal part of the wall!:

"It's an elevator. I think. Um, an elevator is - a sort of mechanical moving room that goes up and down between floors, for people who can't manage stairs or are carrying something heavy or whatever. They can be purely mechanical but the ones I'm used to need electricity for the controls, and this place has electric lights so I'm guessing it's the electric kind, and if the grid is live here then this button should -" she presses it, "open it. I think. If there are instructions I can't read them. Um, do you see those switches up near the ceiling? We can test if the lights work, if you can move them with your magic." She was keeping a hopeful eye out for long sticks or other potential tools to extend her reach, but hasn't spotted any. 

Belrun can see the switches up there once they're pointed out. She flicks one, and the lights come on.

"Great! This place isn't totally abandoned, which means someone might show up at some point and be able to tell us where we are, and if we're extra lucky there might be a communications grid here as well. I'm guessing we want to look for a small metal or plastic object, maybe wired directly into a wall, with some sort of visible control interface. Which I'm almost certainly not going to recognize at all but you can get pretty far with trial and error. We could start at that desk-thing, that looks like a workstation of some kind." 

Does the elevator open? 

The elevator appears to have been locked.

:I don't know what plastic is,: Belrun says. :Or a communications grid:

The desk has no electronics, though it does have electrical outlets, which Merrin might or might not be able to identify as such. There's also a pad of paper with a logo and some foreign text on the backing, and a cupful of pens, and a first aid kit tucked under the desk, and a corkboard that was mostly but not entirely cleared off and still has a couple pins, one with a scrap of colorful paper, attached, along with the lidded cup of pins bolted to the bottom of the board.

Merrin makes another mental note to check later if Belrun can also deal with the lock on the elevator, but it seems less urgent given the stairs right there. She examines everything at the desk instead. 

"Pen and paper! Oh, good. Um, a communications grid is - basically a setup where you have electronic devices designed as communication-interfaces of some kind, text or voice or voice-and-video are the common ones and easiest to explain - and they're connected to a broader system that has links between far-apart places. It doesn't have to be physical links, you can use radio or aimed comms lasers, but I think physical wires - metal that conducts electricity, or maybe fiber-optics that transmit light - are more robust and feasible at lower tech levels. If you have that, you can instantly communicate with other devices on the network even if they're very far away. But you do need the interface and I haven't seen a solid possibility for it yet. Plastic is...a synthetic material usually made from hydrocarbons or processed plants, I don't know how the processing works, it's usually stable against deterioration unless it's biodegradable on purposes so it lasts longer than wood. I think this cup thingy is plastic." 

She has tentatively identified the electrical outlets as some sort of outlet to some sort of grid or network, but she's not sure yet whether it's for electricity or something else. "Um, can you keep an eye out for anything that looks the right shape to stick into holes like those? Probably metal." 

She starts eagerly inventorying the contents of the first aid kit. 

Belrun taps the cup, and inspects the pens, some of which are also plastic. :Will do:

The first aid kit has assorted sticky bandages, a roll of gauze, a chemical heat pack and a chemical cold pack, some velcro splints, some peroxide, an ear thermometer, a tube of ointment, and some bottles of pills. Merrin can't read any of the labels, of course.