:If you attempt to get lung cancer anytime soon I will kill it for you. I will pluck the quail if you get the firewood:

Merrin is happy with this division of labor, and carries the quail back to the building before forging out again in search of firewood. She is, at this point, just barely continuing to function by running on sheer adrenaline, which she has much less of now that the situation seems to be mostly under control and not actually an emergency, just bizarre. She is no longer really processing new information at all. Fortunately, getting firewood and breaking it into fireplace-sized lengths does not require having any original thoughts. 

By the time Belrun has the quail plucked, Merrin has the fireplace set with a nice teepee of smaller kindling with some papery bark she found torn into strips and curled up in the base, and the larger lengths of branch arranged on top. She is also yawning and blinking and clearly on her last legs. 

Belrun's gotten the flue open and she starts the tinder going with a flick of magic. :You can nap if you want, I know how to cook:

"...I might need to. Sorry. I've been awake for - probably more than twenty hours at this point." 

She curls up in one of the carnivorous chairs and puts her head down on the arm and closes her eyes, and is asleep within about a minute. 

Belrun roasts the quail, adding them in one at a time as she gets them plucked.

Merrin stays asleep throughout this entire process. She's very tired. 

It was first thing in the morning for Belrun, so she's not tired and continues not to be tired. She eats the first quail to come off the fire, and the second, and the third, since she's the one who stops being able to do magic if she runs low on internal resources and quail are tiny and she hasn't eaten since dinner last night, but she saves the last one for Marian. Having proof-of-concepted the fireplace they can go after bigger game next time.

The chair and her position in it are not actually very comfortable for sleeping, and eventually the mouthwatering smell of roasted quail and the crick in Merrin's neck wake her. She sits up, yawning. "It's ready?" 

:Yes. I ate most of it but I left one for you. I'm sorry it doesn't have any salt or anything:

"We should maybe try to find salt in the longer run for electrolyte-balance reasons but right now I am not complaining." 

That is the most disconcertingly definitely-a-dead-animal-looking food that Merrin has ever consumed. It still has the wings on. And the feet. At least Belrun thoughtfully removed the head, so there aren't eyes and a beak right there. And it's calories. Well-cooked calories that are unlikely to give her food poisoning, and since Belrun has magic healing powers, she could deal with that anyway. Merrin devours it. 

"...We should get water. I'm thirsty, you must be too. I think there were some disposable cups left upstairs - did you spot any bigger containers than that?" 

:Nothing bigger than the thing holding all the pens, no. The plumbing works, I tried the bathroom after I was done eating and was able to figure out the faucet. I just drank out of my hands:

"I guess that works fine while we're sticking around this building. Which we should probably do for at least a day or two anyway, in case the building staff come by for maintenance sometimes, and it's not urgent to move on if we can manage to hunt animals for food. We're going to need a container for water if we want to walk any significant distance though. What do you think?" 

:I don't know how likely it is we'd find more water on the way. Do you have a good guess how long you can walk without? If you walked half that distance down the road - there's a road - and then turned back, we'd know if there was another place to stop for water:

"If it's not a hot day and I can fill up on as much water as I want first, I should be able to walk for five, six hours without too much trouble. I could cover twenty miles in that time although it wouldn't be fun. Normally I wouldn't trust random standing water outdoors, but I guess your magic helps with that." She yawns again. "...Sorry. I'll be better at planning logistics once I've properly caught up on sleep. Though I should try to stay up until it's getting dark here, probably." 

:Yeah, sterilizing water isn't even a very expensive working. If you find a stream, that's our new extension point in terms of finding water:

"We might be able to improvise a container, too - I've found enough fasteners already that if I can just find a plastic sheet, that'd do. ....Plastic is waterproof and it can be made really thin, so it's flexible like cloth, and I could fold something around into a waterproof bag and hold it like that with rubber bands and binder clips. It wouldn't be durable but it'd do for a day." Another yawn. "...Want to ask me how to say things in Baseline? I'm kind of out of having-original-thoughts right now but I can do that and it'll keep me awake." 

:Sure: Belrun will come up with more phrases she might want to be able to say in conditions of extremity.

This, plus lots of cold water splashed on her face in the bathroom, gets Merrin through the next hour or so without actually falling asleep again. She curls up sideways in the excessively cozy chair and watches the angle of the light through the window and occasionally feeds another stick to the fire; the chimney is very functional, she can smell woodsmoke which means some unfortunate chemicals are probably reaching her lungs but in the moment it's actually pleasant. 

It's probably somewhere around 4 am in her actual timezone, now, and maybe late morning to noon in Belrun's originating timezone; in this world, how many hours of daylight does it look like they still have? 

The sun is dropping; probably it'll be full dark in an hour or two.

Merrin stretches. 

"I'm not sure exactly what season it is here or how long the night's going to be, but I think I'll plan on going to sleep as soon as it's dark. I'm guessing you're not tired yet, which - probably it's actually a good idea for one of us to be awake, in case anyone shows up and wants an explanation of why we snuck into this place. Are you going to need more food before the morning? Because if so we should probably look for animals before it's dark. If you kept the guts from the birds, I can bait some traps, but that'll take ages to set up and I don't think I can do it tonight." 

:I'm hungry, but not to the point where it's obviously worth going out hunting again. I put the guts outside, I can put the pen cup upside down over them so they don't get eaten overnight:

"Sure, that's a good plan." Another jaw-cracking yawn. "I - should try to stay up a bit longer or I'll be awake in the middle of the night. Maybe we can tell each other things about our worlds?" 

:Sure. Anything specific you want to know?:

"I guess I'm curious to hear more about how - things work in general, with the much lower technology level but also having magic. What's your Governance like? What are schools like? How does food production work? Do you have mass manufactured goods at all? How do you transport them? ...That was a lot of questions, sorry, I just - really don't have much of a model of where things would end up very different from dath ilan." 

:Government depends on the place - I live in a monarchy, where the monarch has to have a magic horse for traditional reasons. Schools are sort of an institution in development, we don't even have everyone reading yet... Food is grown on farms? Or fished out of the river? Or hunted in the woods? I think no on the mass-manufactured goods, how you're thinking of them - or, no, as of relatively recently we got printing presses up and running, so we can mass-print books, though they still need to be hand-bound. You can put most things on a barge and float them up or down the river, and other things go in horse-drawn carts: