"I don't speak that language, sorry," Merrin says out loud, just on the low-probability off chance that somehow the locals here understand Baseline. Though she can't see how that could be the case. She lifts her hands and tries to look very apologetic and harmless, and to convey via gestures that she doesn't understand them and is very lost. 

If they seem upset she should probably just go wake Belrun, but she'll check first, if they don't seem upset or angry then maybe she can somehow put that off. 

He seems more confused than anything, but in a kind of bordering-on-angry way!

That's not ideal! 

Merrin tries to convey via mime that she's going into the building and will be right back, and then she heads into the building. (It's probably not the worst thing if he follows her in and up the stairs but she's kind of hoping he doesn't.) 

He doesn't follow her; he circles back to the vehicles to talk to the other people in them.

Merrin does not have telepathy and cannot reach Belrun at a distance even though that would be really convenient! Instead she jogs up the stairs and hunts around to find which room Belrun picked to sleep in and then knocks politely on the door. "Belrun! Um, there are people here." 

:...oh good. Is it?: says Belrun, and she hauls herself out of bed and into the bathroom.

"I'm hoping it'll be good once we can communicate with them but the man who tried to talk to me seemed really confused about me showing up at the front door, and I don't think I succeeded at conveying that we're lost and just want to know where we are." Merrin waits for Belrun at the door. 

She's out presently. :I'll talk to them:

Merrin heads back down to the front door with her, and waves at the people by the vehicles. 

:Do you want me to include you in this conversation - it's a little more expensive, there are already a lot of them and I don't know how many I'll have to talk to at once:

"I mean, all else being equal I would prefer having any idea what's going on? But I don't think it's worth using up a lot of your Gift reserves." 

:I'll update you as things become clearer:

She talks to the locals, who sometimes respond out loud and sometimes don't. Eventually she tells Merrin, :This is a seasonal facility for skiing, and these people are here to, uh, glide around on those wing things in the truck - that one over there works for the facility and is along to unlock the building for them and start the bench-on-wires thing for going up the hill - they don't have any more idea what the snakes were about than we do -:

"...Yeah, I wasn't really expecting them to have anything useful on the snakes. Do they have suggestions for who else might know? ...Or, um, do they have - food. Also do they want us to leave?"  

:They have food. The guy who works here wants us to leave and says he'll give us a ride downhill when the glider people are done, which will be in four hours:

"Did he say where he's giving us a ride to?" 

:The town is called Choss but he doesn't seem to have a strong idea of what we'll do there besides not be at this particular building he's responsible for:

Merrin nods. Sighs. "...I guess that's better than being stuck here. If it's a town then there'll be more people and maybe some of them will have ideas. - Um, I'm guessing you didn't get around to asking them about local conditions? Whether they have magic, whether they have Keepers, you know, that sort of thing." 

:No magic, they were very surprised about Mindspeech. I don't think I understand Keepers well enough to relay the concept without language attached:

"...Yeah. Fair." This isn't going to get much easier, since Merrin herself has no way of communicating directly, unless and until she learns an entire new language, which she's never done in her entire life and has to assume on priors she'll be very slow at. 

She spends the time that they're waiting mostly on thinking and taking notes, so she can work out the most efficient way to ask questions via Belrun relaying. 

The hanggliding crowd has apparently determined that Belrun and Merrin are not going to be a problem for them and gone to do their hanggliding. They assemble their giant sail rig things and attach them to little hitches on the chairlift and sit on the benches and go up the hill, and then they practice gliding down; it's apparently an instructor and several novices. The resort employee has a subdivided box of various snacks in his vehicle, in addition to his own packed lunch, and after kind of a lot of pleading from Belrun will give them some food, though he insists on picking his least favorites out of the box and looks pretty annoyed about it. They now have a bag of dried pineapple and the dregs of a bag of pistachios and a sleeve of fruity sandwich cookies to split, and a bag of dense garlicky bagel chips apiece.

Merrin watches the hanggliding proceedings with fascination, and wonders what their safety protocols are, because that sure looks like something that could be really dangerous if not done carefully enough! 

She tells Belrun that she should probably have most of the food, since they're relying on her telepathy in order to communicate at all and she needs to be replenishing her magical reserves. 

Then Belrun will take more than half of the shared snacks, though not all of any of them, and Merrin still gets her bagel chips all to herself. They're not exactly more enjoyable than a dath ilani snack one is really paying attention to, but they're very - moreish.

Merrin is mostly wondering how much protein they have. Seems like not as much as she would really prefer. Oh well. Also they're, like, weirdly salty? She isn't going to complain because her body could probably also use the electrolytes. 

"Are you doing all right?" she asks Belrun, once they're both done eating. "I wasn't sure if you would've gotten enough sleep - I'm sorry I had to wake you." 

:I slept okay considering, uh, everything in play that worked against sleeping okay. The bed was really comfy:

".....Huh, really? I thought my bed was mediocre. I mean, it was fine, I was really tired and I'm - more used to non-ideal sleeping situations than most people I know - but still."