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." 

: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.

On the bright side, she can mostly without much difficulty figure out what the items are. The only ones she doesn't already have on her are the chemical packs; these ones are less than perfectly useful to her, it's fairly intuitive what they are but, without ripping them open to guess at the actual chemical contents, she can't tell for sure which is which. Probably the blue one is cold and the red one is hot? She's not sure how culturally contingent color-associations like that are, though. 

Either way, she doesn't need them right now. She puts everything away. 

"We should also look for a sink or bathroom, for water." Food, too, but she's not expecting there to be any perishables left around and there might be nothing at all. "Um, does your world have plumbing?" 

:Yes, though not enough of it that I'd expect a random unoccupied building to have it:

"I...think plumbing is easier than electric lights?" 

They're going to have to venture upstairs at some point anyway, but for now Merrin just looks around for any doors on the first floor that might, if opened, prove to contain a bathroom. If this is the kind of building that has bedrooms at all, they almost certainly won't be on the first floor, but a bathroom is the kind of the thing that someone coming inside might want in a hurry. 

She's also going to try opening any and all cupboards or drawers or other receptacles she sees. 

The desk drawers contain more random writing implements, binder clips, rubber bands, a bag of individually wrapped foodlike objects with a picture of a crow and a magpie on the package, sticky notes, two more pushpins, three copies of a booklet with a picture of what might be this building and environs in the wintertime with a bunch of happy bundled-up people on sleds and digging snow tunnels and making ice sculptures in among the incomprehensible text, and a little square battery which isn't the same shape as any Merrin has ever seen but which is more likely a battery than anything else.

The foodlike items seem like a good sign - not that there can possibly be very many calories, there, and she's not sure what they are or whether they're intended for human consumption, they're clearly not made of bird meat so maybe the images mean they're for feeding to birds - but it suggests this place wasn't so thoroughly packed up that all the nonperishable snacks were taken away. 

She hands Belrun one of the booklets. "I have a guess that this place isn't actually abandoned, just - seasonal use only, maybe? This looks to me like an - advertisement? For some kind of recreation. ...I wonder if they have spare warm clothing in storage, for visitors coming in winter. That would be good to find, in case it gets cold at night and we can't find fuel for the fireplace." 

She sits down at the desk for a moment, frowning. "I think we should go explore upstairs, but maybe first we should finish coming up with a list of basic phrases for you to learn in Baseline, in case - something unexpected happens and you end up using a lot of magic." 

:Why wouldn't the visitors bring their own clothes? Which would fit?: says Belrun, settling down in the desk chair to transliterate some Baseline.

"Presumably they would but I think it's fairly common for well-organized places to have spares, in case someone, I don't know, gets wet or something. Seems worth checking." 

Merrin has been mulling on this, and comes up with a list of about twenty phrases for conveying: basic physical needs, several different types of warnings-of-danger, and some variations on 'I have a plan to handle this', 'I have a plan that needs input from you to complete', 'I have a plan that needs you to take an action', and 'I don't have a plan and am hoping you can do something'. The latter category is apparently something that can be crammed down into a surprisingly efficient number of syllables for Belrun to transliterate. None of it is terribly hard for her to pronounce. 

Belrun writes it all down in the alphabets she knows.

With that taken care of, and the ground-level rooms thoroughly explored, maybe they can try exploring upstairs? 

(It continues to be obvious to Belrun's Thoughtsensing that Merrin is tracking her surroundings very carefully, and apparently keeping a perfect mental inventory of every single object she's seen so far and its location and potential uses, in addition to constantly planning ahead several steps. Her situational awareness isn't quite on the level of Leareth's but this has to be half because she lacks Othersenses. She is not at all giving the impression of being someone who has difficulty absorbing new information.) 

Belrun's not trying to read her mind but bits of it come through when Merrin says something.

Upstairs there are empty vending machines and a hot drink dispenser (empty) and hotel rooms - they're locked, but Belrun can Farsee into the first couple and determine they're all about the same except for having different color schemes and being mirrored relative to each other. They have ensuite bathrooms. At the end of the hall of hotel rooms there's a room with some more of the carnivorous-looking furniture looking out onto the slope they walked down, with a couple of arcade games up against one wall and a place with glass display cases that looks like it might sell food if it weren't closed up.

Merrin continues to memorize the locations of everything. She's starting to hit her spatial-working-memory capacity by the end, but this is the kind of memorization task that she's best at, where her training helps the most. 

When they reach the end of the hall, she sits on one of the chairs, or rather sinks down into it. "...Right. So we've got places to sleep and a source of water, but no food unless there's some in cupboards. And - I still want to do a second pass, but I didn't see any kind of communications device either. So I don't know what our options are for finding a person who can help us figure out where we are, except for...waiting, I guess? Or trying to find a map and walking to wherever's nearest here. Which I'm not up for, right now, and it might be even harder for you." 

:There's more floors, upstairs, but Farseeing up it looks like more of the same that's on this floor: She flips through her booklet looking for a map; there is an extremely desultory one marking two points with a wiggly line between them. Some of the background is white and most of it is green. There's no indication of scale. :I think possibly I should look around for wildlife to turn into dinner before I start getting low on reserves from hunger, rather than after:

"Do you have a good way of finding wildlife? I, um, technically did a training once on setting traps for animals, but it's pretty hard without any supplies, and I'm not sure how well I could make do with the objects we've found here so far. And I never actually got good at the tracking animals part. I know about edible plants in my world but there's no reason to expect them to be the same here." 

:I was planning to touchsight for something that burrows, or maybe Farsee into the woods for a deer, and then kill it with Fetching. I too could not confidently identify any edible plants:

"Your magic is incredibly cool. Should we go do that now, then? What's your range - do we need to actually walk around in the woods to get close enough to something?" 

:My Farsight range isn't incredible but it's good enough that I won't need to startle a deer. And if I find a rabbit or spot a pheasant or something before then so much the better. You're coming along?:

"I'll come." She's very very tired, but not to the point of significant physical impairment, and given Belrun's mysterious balance problem, she would rather be nearby to clear a path and be within reach if Belrun trips and injures herself, and maybe be the one who treks through underbrush to actually retrieve a dead animal. (She's noticing quietly to herself that she isn't delighted at the concept of killing and eating an actual animal, but she's not squeamish about it, per se, she doesn't expect to have any trouble with the process, it's just not ideal.) 

Back down the stairs they go, then. Belrun pauses at the edge of the nearest clump of trees, scouting ahead by magic. :- Quail: she says. :I'm going to head for them so I spend less reserves on range, and when they notice the approach and try to run away start killing them, they're little and we can probably eat them all between us:

"Sure, all right." 

Merrin accompanies her. She's actually pretty good at moving through the woods silently; she's clearly had practice, and the clothing she selected for a grueling day of training is more appropriate for this than what Belrun is wearing. 

Yeah, the slippers aren't helping at all, though the Whites aren't awful. Tromp tromp. The quail startle when they're quite close, launching themselves into the air in a flurry of feathers; one by one Belrun snatches them out of the air and slams them into the nearest tree.

Merrin only winces a very tiny amount, and then wades in to collect the bodies. 

"...Is your magic any good for cooking? I didn't see any proper kitchen facilities, the probably-a-food-place upstairs seemed to be just snacks, so our best other option is probably to light the fireplace and, um, skewer them on sticks and roast them? If we can't find anything better I can probably butcher them enough to get the guts out with my scalpel although I won't want to use it for anything medical afterward." 

:Fireplace and roasting sounds good to me:

"I still haven't seen any fuel. I - guess we can technically burn some of this?" There's a dead branch on the ground. She gestures at it, but can't pick it up because her hands are full of quail. "The smoke will be awful though." Merrin's thoughts make it clear that she feels burning random deadfall wood from the forest is an appalling fallback option when you have literally no other choice. She technically knows how to light a fire with wood. She's done it before. She did not, then, stick around in order to breathe in the resulting smoke, because even authentic training is not worth the higher chance of respiratory problems. 

:The fireplace does have a chimney, though I suppose I should check if they have it blocked off while the place is empty:

"I guess it's not going to increase our chance of lung cancer later in life by very much if it's only a night or two. Though if the chimney's blocked I think it might also make the entire building uninhabitable so we should definitely check that. I'll make a run back after this for wood, if you want to start de-feathering them?" 

: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:

Merrin nods along. 

"That's - less magic involved in things than I'd been expecting?" 

:I haven't been able to implant Gifts in people for very long, and then they need training. Eventually we hope to have a Gate network, but there's a lot of other infrastructure we want to work on in the meantime:

"Do most people not have Gifts at all, then?" 

:Yeah, most don't. And some are rarer than others. Valdemar in particular, my country, doesn't have very many mages - Rethwellan, where I was educated, has a lot more, and they don't have a gate network either. Mages are the most flexible - Mindspeech is convenient and Healers are very important and I'm personally fond of Fetching but if you want infrastructure you need mages, making and powering artifacts:

Merrin nods, slowly. "So...it sounds like there are a lot of problems, and the fastest solution to some of those problems is via something that you can do, except - you're not there. Did you say your husband can also do it, though?" 

:Yes, though in the short term I expect him to be working on tracking me down!:

"Right. I'm guessing someone is going to be trying to track me down too, but I don't even know where they would start, unless the snake thing turns out to be easy to capture and study. Which I somehow doubt. It seems more likely to eat scientists, although in that case I might've expected some other new arrivals."

She's almost HOPING that the snake will eat a scientist. She could really use backup here from someone better equipped to study and make sense of a bizarre and unprecedented situation like this one. She does not actually hope this will happen because that would be kind of a terrible thing to wish on someone else and also who knows whether the process is even replicable like that. 

:Yeah, I don't know whether Leareth - my husband - is going to get here by studying the snake or by doing something like tracking me by our lifebond and my bond to Amshalan, my magic horse. But I'm sure he's on it one way or the other. Once he's got it figured out if your people haven't located you we can try to get you to your home?:

"That would be really amazing, if it comes to that! Is your husband very good at magic?" 

:Best in the world:

"Wow! That's– hmm, actually I guess I don't know if that's a weird and surprising coincidence, maybe there's some kind of selection criteria on who gets eaten by snakes and pooped out into another world. Although that doesn't explain me. I'm very boringly ordinary." 

:I'm not boringly ordinary at all but I wasn't doing anything much at the time. Also the local god ought to have had the courtesy to warn me:

“The local— wait, what? Back up and start at the beginning? You have - I’m not even totally parsing what that concept is -“

:Do you not have them? They're often more trouble than they're worth, but we do have them. Gods are weird magic people who see the future kinda instead of the present and they're good at engineering coincidences and don't have bodies? The future thing makes them very weird but Leareth did some work with ours to make Them easier to talk to:

"No! We don't have those! .....I think. I'm fairly sure we don't have those. I'm guessing that engineered coincidences - stand out as noticeably different from what you would expect from just normal causality and randomness?" 

Merrin is thinking that conceivably this is the kind of thing that the Keepers might have learned about and decided to classify as an infohazard. It feels very infohazard-shaped. She....still doesn't think so, though. The world she experienced wasn't one that had unexplained sources of confusion and outcomes that were off from her predictions - or from much smarter people's predictions. 

"- What did Leareth do, to - make gods easier to talk to? I'm struggling to think how it would even be possible to interact with them if they don't have bodies and can't talk in normal ways." 

:A lot of the time it's not very conspicuous until they start giving people visions or doing miracles or trying to assassinate my husband, which they do sometimes - many of them like having mortal churches for some reason - so I suppose yours could all be hiding. Uh, there was an artifact created by a god called the Star-Eyed and he did very complicated magic to co-opt it from her and turn it over to the local god, who we're calling Shadowgod for lack of a better idea, with some extra magical scaffolding of some kind that helps bridge the gap so it can just Mindspeak us instead of doing visions and talking to people through a weird puppet when they have near-death experiences and stuff:

".....Okay, um, back up a step, you're saying the the weird powerful magical disembodied people with future-seeing-magic have tried to murder your husband specifically? Why? Or is that just a normal thing that happens sometimes?" 

:Oh, they don't like him specifically because he has grand ambitions that make it harder to see the future. They like everything to be very samey and low-tech and predictable so they can see farther and he fogs things up for them. Shadowgod is chill though:

Merrin has so little idea what to say to any of that! Are condolences appropriate? 'I'm sorry the superpowerful magical aliens keep trying to kill your loved one'? 

"What sorts of grand ambitions does he have?" she settles on, finally. 

:Oh, ending death, ushering in a new age of prosperity, developing our collective resources sufficiently to weather the forthcoming catastrophic magical weather...:

"Awwwwwww. That's so romantic. You are literally married to the perfect archetype of the very powerful supervillain gendertrope." 

("Supervillain" comes across to Thoughtsensing as containing zero connotations of evil or condemnableness, but definitely some connotations of 'likes dramatic dark volcano lairs and giving eloquent monologuing'.)

...It's kind of a suspicious level of romantic, actually? Merrin is not sure she has ever encountered this level of romance gendertrope outside of romance novels. Is Belrun literally from a romance novel.

She suddenly has a pileup of additional questions, from "do you have any other boyfriends who are equally interesting" and "was he possibly sort of struggling before you met him", to "is it fair to say that if your world was a book he would be the protagonist". 

Belrun is getting the hang of not getting thoughts that are not components of what's being communicated to her but she does get the connotations to a fair depth. :- he does have an underground lair but it's not near a volcano. Why would it be near a volcano. I don't think he does a lot of dramatic monologues either:

"Because volcanos are an extremely cool dramatic aesthetic that goes well with the supervillain aesthetic? ...I'm not really sure why that association is so strong actually." Okay no she has to ask. "Do you also have other boyfriends who are that interesting and excellent?" 

:No? Is that normal where you're from, having surplus boyfriends?:

"I mean, I wouldn't say it's very common in real life but it's - a storytrope that would go with the sort of romance novel where the male protagonist is a powerful supervillain who's the best in the world at magic and has grand ambitions to end death. ....Is he immortal? In the romance novel version he would probably be immortal, and have offered it to you, like, a day after you met. And have some convincing reason for falling instantly in love even though he's never truly loved anyone before. ...Sorry, your world is probably not actually best modeled as a particular genre of fiction." 

:He is immortal. I went on not being immortal for some time after we met because his original setup had some flaws. Uh, we are lifebonded, which is a thing where when two people have souls of the right corresponding shapes and then hang out together long enough they get glued to each other - we didn't want it but we were distracted enough not to notice for a while. I would rather like to read the sort of books you have where we'd be normal sorts of story protagonists:

"- Wait, okay, wow. I was really not expecting that. ...I'm actually not very into the kind of fiction where there are mysterious soul connections, it weirds me out a bit, but it's popular with some people. Ummmm, now I kind of want to try to make more advance predictions and see if those also hold, even though I have no idea what it would even mean for your life in another world to be something I can make predictions about via romance novel genre tropes. Was he - sort of struggling as a person before he met you? Was he....doomed to failure at his greatest ambitions because he was missing some key piece of the puzzle, which you were able to provide by having your own rare powers or skills?" 

:I don't think he was especially - struggling as a person? I'm not sure what that means but he had his underground lair and so on. And his greatest ambitions might have worked out but they would have sucked without the amendment I came up with:

"Huh. Okay, I'm giving myself half points at best for that, but....still. Wow. I think I want to meet your husband. ...Um, I promise I will not try to steal your husband! I'm not sure that's even really what my romantic fantasy would include, it sounds - really high stakes, as a life to actually have to live. But good for you." 

:I didn't think you were going to try to steal him and if you tried it probably wouldn't work, he's basically asexual apart from the lifebond. But yes, we do rather yank the arc of history around with our teeth:

Giggle. "Wow. Incredible. That...is not giving me less of an impression that you have just stepped out of a popular romance. - Are you happy with it? You seem pretty pleased with yourself about it." 

:It was rough going for some time but now I get to be queen and preside over some rather amazing developments!:

"Oh, um, what...happened?" Merrin's mind is immediately filled with trope-based guesses, but it feels much less appropriate to share those here. "If you don't mind me asking. I understand if you'd rather not talk about it." 

:It's complicated! And some of the details are sensitive:

"Oh. That's all right, sorry." 

Merrin is just going to sit here coming up with wild hypotheses for what could have happened based on her mostly-osmosed understanding of supervillain-gendertrope-focused romance. They were probably separated by the forces opposed to everything Leareth is fighting for, obviously. Belrun might have believed he was dead and that she would have to carry on his work alone? Maybe he was captured by an evil powerful-magical-alien who tried to trick him into working against his true goals, she's pretty sure one of her friends mentioned a book with that plot once. 

:It's all right. Things seem stable now except for this... snake business:

"Mmm. Do you think that - could've been related? Is it something that the gods who are - less in favor of what you and Leareth are working on, could have been involved in?" 

:It'd require a lot of assumptions to be wrong but I suppose it's not impossible? Doesn't explain you at all though:

"No, it doesn't." Merrin sighs. "My life is definitely not nearly as interesting as yours, but - I guess I'm not actually completely uninteresting. I'm not actually the best endurance paramedic in the whole world, I think, when you weigh all the factors, and that would be a very narrow thing to be best in the world at anyway, but I'm....pretty good. It's the one area where I can make up for being significantly below median intelligence by having a lot of other very rare traits that line up just right. ...I'm not married. I would probably not marry someone who if the world was a novel would be the protagonist, that sounds stressful. I have one boyfriend who's kind of going for the supervillain gendertrope but he's a minor one at best - he's a moderately famous author who picks out people who follow his writing to serve him in his volcano base. I don't live there though. Even if he were a best-in-the-world level supervillain I would only want to see him once a month or so, I have a lot of commitments." 

:So your boyfriend actually has a volcano base? It just seems kind of impractical to me! Volcanoes are hot! And sometimes explode!:

"It's a little impractical! I don't want to actually live in one. Although it's a non-explodey volcano. Thoroughly geologically mapped and certified safe to a very high degree of confidence for the next century. There are hot springs which are great but most of the lair is climate-controlled." 

:I guess hot springs sound nice:

Merrin yawns again. "Sorry. So what nice amenities does your husband have in his underground lair? He sounds like the sort of person who might go for a really extensive library." 

:Oh, he does, though most of it is in languages I can't read - he knows a lot of them, being immortal:

"Huh. How many languages are there? That sounds really inconvenient." 

:I suppose it's a little inconvenient, but normally everyone in an area speaks the same one. There are certainly - dozens? I don't know about hundreds but hundreds wouldn't shock me:

"Weird. Do you have any idea why people didn't just all coordinate on one language for simplicity? It must be pretty costly for long-distance trade agreements." 

:...well, there aren't a lot of long-distance trade agreements, since moving things is expensive. Languages just sort of drift over time. Rethwellani and Valdemaran are related but not mutually intelligible, and that's not a thing that they did on purpose, it's just a matter of the two countries not having everybody in them mix across the border all the time:

"....Huh. I - guess that makes sense? That it'd be harder to coordinate on a single language at a tech level where transport was more limited? I never really thought about it before." There's almost certainly fiction that explores the concept, and presumably the Keepers know what dath ilan's actual history looked like, but Merrin herself knows nothing about the time before Baseline was universal. 

:Also most people aren't very good at languages? People manage but it would be very hard for most people to just stop speaking their original languages even if some kind of trade-tongue got popular. So that'd slow things down, and also it would not exactly make it easier to read old books. How long have you all been speaking one language?:

"Huh. I expect I would be pretty bad at learning an entire new language but if I just had to learn one once I think I'd agree to it for the obvious benefits to myself and the broader society?" She shrugs, sort of self-consciously. "I don't...actually know, I'm not a Keeper. Centuries?" 

'Keeper' has a lot of complicated overtones and connotations, most of which don't especially map to anything Belrun is familiar with. Keeper of knowledge, of secrets, of the past, of history, of information too dangerous to be widely known or just too awkward to be net positive if public - there's a fragment there to do with Merrin herself but she's not following that thought-path right now. 

:Keepers are... historians...?: says Belrun fumbling with the concept.

"- Oh wait. Um. If it's not obvious then I...need to think a bit about how to even explain it. They're...the very smart people who keep track of the very important things? In general but it's especially important for the things that are important and also where it'd be bad for everyone to be aware of and thinking about them all the time. You go to them for advice if you're confused about something and they un-confuse you? Or I guess sometimes if you're being very obtuse about the noticing you need advice part then they just come find you." Merrin has PERSONAL EXPERIENCE of this, it was honestly kind of embarrassing. "I...by definition can't tell you most of what they spend their time thinking about. Since I'm not one and I think most Keepers are, like, three or four standard deviations higher intelligence than me so I wouldn't even understand what they're working on." 

:I am missing some of the concepts you're using. They do... counseling? And have... high security clearances? And are... much smarter than you, plus the security clearance thing, so you don't know most of what they do besides counseling?:

"That's...not wrong but it feels like saying, I don't know, a fiction author is someone who answers messages from their fans, it's - a small fraction of what they do and it's not the most important part. They make public statements as well as doing individual explanations, though that's also not most of what they're working on - they decide amongst themselves on policy decisions for the whole world, I think... They're - just, you can't have a Governance that makes reasonable plans and responds sanely to unexpected problems if no one's keeping track of all the infohazards." 

'Infohazards', now that Merrin is focusing more on the concept as she thinks it, is another complicated bundle of associations that would, in Velgarth, mostly not be bundled together under a single word. Infohazards are facts about engineering or physics that make it very, very cheap for a clever person to cause vast amounts of damage, and obviously most people won't want to but there are a lot of people. Infohazards are whatever lurks behind the veil of dath ilan's screened-off history - temptingly inevitable societal mistakes, maybe? Experiments that were tried and failed and will predictably fail but that someone would want to have another go at anyway? Infohazards are facts about the world that, while true, won't enable most people to make better decisions for including them in their realitymodels, and will predictably make them sad or scared. Infohazards are some mathematical arguments that are oh so compellingly logical and compelling and involve multiplying by infinities and are so, so tempting to follow off a cliff, distorting all of a person's reasoning toward their goals.

(At least, Merrin has been told this is a thing? She personally doesn't feel like this would happen to her in real life, and in fact she went through a rebellious youthful phase where she declared to everyone that this category was stupid, but the thing about a world full of people of +4 SD intelligence from yours is that you kind of have to have a very strong prior that if your intuitions disagree with theirs, they're right. Maybe Merrin is just too bad at math.) 

:We don't have... almost any of that. Screened off history??:

"Yeah. Our history before the last century is - only known by Keepers. I'm not sure why. There's presumably a very good reason." 

:Wow. Yeah, we don't have that. I can't imagine what a good reason to do that might be, actually:

"- I'm not sure? Um, if you don't have Keepers, who are your Very Serious People? You know, the people who have correct opinions on things and everyone knows they're generally right and worth listening to and that way you can get all the smart competitive young people to actually coordinate where it matters?" 

:Uh... I have advisors and a council and stuff? They're not always right, nobody's always right!:

"Nobody's always right! I'm sure Keepers are wrong sometimes - I wouldn't personally be able to assess that, but domain experts definitely make mistakes. There are a lot of mechanisms in place to ensure that they notice and update from it and can avoid making exactly the same kind of mistake twice." 

She wonders if Belrun's country uses prediction markets. Leareth sounds like the sort of person who would see the value. If it were a very specific genre of romance novel there would be an entire chapter on him inventing the concept from scratch. Merrin has no idea if this is plausible or not for an actual person from an actual low-tech fantasy world with magic but it's certainly romantic. 

:Okay? I guess that sounds nice except for the part where they can decide to make everyone stop studying history, that sounds bad:

"Why do you think that's bad?" 

:I told you Leareth has an extensive library, though I couldn't read most of it, but it sounds like if a library at all like it existed in your world you wouldn't be allowed to? And you don't know why?:

"I - um - wait, sorry, recalibrating." 

Merrin closes her eyes and tries to think for ten seconds. 

"....Sorry. I hadn't previously been thinking of Leareth as - basically a Keeper? Or as, um, whatever would replace Keepers if that wasn't an institution that exists locally. I - honestly don't know why not, it - maybe shouldn't be that surprising. ....Anyway, I - don't actually mind. I guess I might mind more if I didn't trust the Keepers to be much, much smarter and better at reasoning, and also to - care about the same things I do." By definition, almost, since Merrin is pretty sure that's where she learned what was important to care about. 

Pause. 

"...Does Leareth keep a lot of secrets? From most people, I mean, not from you. ...Um, this is slightly a romance-novel-trope prediction but it's mostly not that." 

:...yes:

It seems bizarre and concerning for a world to only have one Keeper– or, no, nevermind - to have only one person fulfilling the role that dath ilan calls 'Keeper' - which is a cluster of traits and responsibilities (and cognitive abilities?) that may not, in fact, need to be so clustered...

...actually she should probably stop trying to map what she knows and understands onto fragments of Law that she herself doesn't even, mostly, understand.

- that kind of only leaves one avenue of safe reasoning, which is 'romance tropes'. 

"I - sorry - how sure are you that he's not also keeping a bunch of secrets from you?" 

:I am pretty sure I know the big ones but he probably has some opsec stuff I don't even care about that I haven't picked up? Plus like - details where I know the broad shape of the contents but might be surprised by smaller stuff, since he's nearly two thousand years old and we haven't known each other long enough for me to go through all his notes even if I could read them all and would want to. Uh, the lifebond does involuntary empathy in both directions, so I think he's probably not just keeping secret that he's keeping secrets. Why do you ask?:

"...I didn't have much logical reason to ask, that was more just a - random romance-tropes prediction...?" 

Pause. 

".......He's two thousand years old???"

That's so many years! Merrin...is pretty sure that sheer number of years should mean something, but she's kind of falling down, right now, on making specific predictions. 

:It's quite the age gap, yes:

"It really is! Wow! Is that...weird?" 

:Not as much as you might think. His memory over time is lossy, and he didn't have any specifically romantic experience before so that's equally new for both of us. But yeah it's kind of weird:

"Did he seriously go two thousand years without being romantically involved with anyone? - I know I made a prediction that based on romance tropes you would be the first person he ever truly loved, but that's so long!" 

:Well, you know, if he got attached to people they'd eventually get killed by the gods. Or just die of old age. Plus the asexual except for me thing:

"Aaaaaaaaaah? That's - the sort of thing that I guess would be a romantic kind of tragic in a book but it's actually just horrible if it's happening to a real person!" 

:Yeah, the gods having it in for you sucks! Fortunately Shadowgod can kind of negotiate with them on our behalf now:

"Why are they called Shadowgod?" 

:Before Leareth set things up so it could just talk to us almost like a regular conversation, its primary way to interact with people was through an avatar called the Shadow-Lover, which, for reasons which remain completely unclear to me, could only talk to people who were in the process of dying or having a near-death experience and I think the "Lover" part is because it's rumored to appear as somebody you find attractive, though I haven't had any near-death experiences so I haven't seen what it does for me. The god for whom the Shadow-Lover is an aspect doesn't have a separate name so we just say Shadowgod:

"....The god has a death avatar that's meant to be attractive to people? That's....very thematically weird. I would really not think that lovers are what would be at the top of most people's minds when they've just died." 

:I know, right? It's bizarre!:

"It's so bizarre!" Merrin looks thoughtful. "What's it like talking to the god now? Is it - much like a person...?" 

:It can only Mindspeak and it's weirdly intense about it and it has no grasp of conversational implicature but it can answer questions!:

"What sorts of things does it know the answers to questions about? Can it - they? - tell you what's going to happen in the future?" 

:Yes, though there are Foresight Gifts, too. I did ask it whether anything would go horribly wrong when I first started trying to give Fetching to Companions - those are the magic horses:

"....I feel like I should maybe have been asking more questions sooner about the magic horses. Why....are there magic horses? What do they do? What are they like?" 

:Gods made them several hundred years ago. They bond to people - usually Gifted - according to some kind of compatibility filtering that has not been fully explained yet. Their purpose for most of that time was to provide transport, emotional support, and ethical guidance - they've got reincarnated human souls so any gods influencing them can be sure to pick souls they think will work out in this capacity. They also come with some mind control to make sure the ethical guidance portion of the package was under divine remit but we figured out how to undo that part and Shadowgod can cut it out in future generations:

There are so many elements there and Merrin's mind is trying to boot up half a dozen lines of questions at once and then slamming into the fact that she does not actually have the ability to ask five questions all at the same time, and it's kind of hard to choose which is most pressing. 

"- They're what? What...is a soul, actually. How is it - preserved, when someone dies - do the gods do that - does everyone have a soul, does that mean in your world nobody actually permanently dies?" 

:Everyone has a soul in Velgarth, I guess I don't know if you do. The soul is the part of you that isn't your memories or your body - so, your basic unlearned personality, I guess. I don't know much about how the gods preserve them and I don't think they necessarily care about all the information that comes attached with one - most reincarnations have no memories at all, Companions do but it's kind of fuzzy, more procedural than episodic or emotional, not everyone is necessarily ever incarnated again. It's the sort of thing that better relations with gods in general could improve a lot:

Merrin stares at her. 

"I...wow. Just. Wow. That has so many implications. I...guess it's not great if being preserved and brought back that way doesn't include memories? Although I'm - really confused about that - my understanding is that memories are encoded in the brain in the same general kind of way as everything else. I guess it's possible that doesn't work the same way in your world. Given that the physical laws are clearly different. ...You know, on reflection it's actually very confusing that your world has humans in it. It seems like there being differences that fundamental should mean that even if there's life it's unrecognizable? But I clearly don't understand this whole multiple worlds thing very well, so." Shrug. 

:There are other intelligent species too but I think they were mostly created by people who wanted them. I don't know if humans were too or if so who would have made us though. I read in a book once that souls are the thing that makes identical twins not the same person:

"Identical twins aren't copies of the same person in dath ilan either! There's, like, epigenetics, and different life experiences, and most traits aren't only genetically determined..." 

She trails off on a jaw-cracking yawn. It is finally starting to get dark outside. "...Sorry. I seem to not be making any headway on getting answers to my questions faster than I think of new questions, and I should probably actually sleep soon. I guess at least there are lots of bedrooms here!" 

:Which one do you want me to unlock for you?:

"I think they're pretty much all the same? I don't really mind." Merrin is way too tired to make decisions right now. 

So Belrun unlocks the first bedroom for her. :Good night. I probably won't stay up all night, but at least it'll be more hours of quiet to confirm that quiet is what's on the menu:

"Yeah, that sounds like a good plan. I'll probably be awake pretty early."

And time to go to sleep! 

Belrun sits up in the artificial light, writing processing notes and eventually, bored with that, inventing a simple cipher that she could conceivably communicate with through the lifebond if Leareth could get literally anything through it at this distance which he probably can't. Eventually when she's no longer distracted from having had only three tiny quail to eat all day she goes to bed across the hall from Merrin.

Things which are very good: SLEEP. Sleep is AMAZING. The bed itself is kind of meh, but Merrin is tired enough that this barely bothers her at all. She sleeps like a rock and does not actually wake up until the morning light starts coming in through her window. 

Belrun's still out by then.

After Merrin has been awake for about long enough to investigate the shower, she can hear some kind of motor outside.

Oh! Intriguing and maybe promising but also slightly alarming! 

Merrin decides that this is probably not enough of an emergency to justify waking Belrun, just yet, especially since she's not sure when Belrun actually got to sleep. She abandons her shower plans, very quickly replaces her shirt, and heads down the stairs to investigate. 

...She realizes just as she's about to open the front door that she does not, in fact, speak the local language, and Belrun is the one with magic telepathy, not her. Oh well. She can start out with gestures and mime, and wake Belrun if it seems like the locals are very upset or angry about their presence and decision to break into the building. 

The motor belongs to a truck with some large sail-looking apparatus in the flatbed, and, following it, a small bus, painted white and blue and with the logo that appears on the brochures on it. The entrance Merrin and Belrun entered the building from faces up the hill and the vehicles are coming from down the hill, so she has to go around the corner to see them. They are at least not puzzled enough to start reacting to her beyond blinking as they pull into the circular dirt extension of the road and park there. The bus driver hops out first and strides up to Merrin, speaking very very fast in a language Merrin does not know.

"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." 

:Maybe your world has invented nicer beds: shrugs Belrun. Belrun turns out to really like dried pineapple.

"I'm pretty sure that a lot of very smart people in my world have put tons of time and attention into inventing better beds! Because if you're going to spend a quarter to a third of your life unconscious, it matters a lot that you do it as efficiently as possible? ....Um, I'm actually a little surprised that Leareth didn't just personally invent the optimal bed, but maybe he had enough other problems to work on first." 

:Well, I suppose it's possible he tried and then the gods destroyed all his work or something. He's never complained about our bed and the one we have in the palace isn't a lot different from the one in the underground lair. Plausibly the ones here are made of weird materials? They did touchsight kind of weird:

"Huh! I'm actually really curious about that! I couldn't tell much about the materials directly. Just that the sheets were...less good? I'm not even sure if I can describe how they were less good, just, they weren't all that comfy to lie on? And they didn't help with being too warm or too cold? ...My mattress was too soft but I think preferences for bed-consistency just legitimately vary a lot between people and there's no reason for the beds here to be how I like them." 

:Can't you just adjust the blankets if you're too warm or too cold?:

"...I mean, sure? But then you have to wake up at least enough to move on purpose, and slightly disrupted sleep is less good for rest than deep sleep the whole time...? ...Also I think a lot of people feel more comfortable and relaxed if they have a constant level of pressure over their whole body? Not everyone, but - I think it was around 60% in dath ilan who found that important -?" 

Merrin knows this because of STUDY DATA and PREDICTION MARKETS and also personal anecdotal experience from herself and patients she's personally worked with, but obviously that needs to be discounted accordingly. 

:Well, maybe in my copious spare time once I get home I will invent a magic hot water bottle that heats up and cools down automatically but I am not going to fault the hotel for not having those:

....Oops, Merrin feels like she said something rude somewhere in there? She's not sure what, though. 

(Merrin is perhaps, even by dath ilan standards, not the best at reading nonverbals.) 

She will continue to wait for their ride out of here. 

Eventually the hanggliders are done. The instructor packs up the equipment and the students get on the bus. Belrun and Merrin can also get on the bus!

A vehicle! Merrin is so curious. And, honestly, also slightly concerned? It's probably fine but she doesn't know that. She will jog around it and try to get a closer look at all the moving parts before they go anywhere. 

The moving parts are mostly inside. The vehicle has six wheels, and electrical contacts on the nose under a protective plastic cover, and it's painted shimmery ice-blue except where the logo appears.

The driver waves Merrin aboard impatiently.

Merrin is super curious about what the electrical contacts under the plastic cover do, but it looks like nothing is going to spectacularly fall apart as soon as they start moving, and also she probably can't learn much more by staring at the exterior, so sure, she'll get on and sit with Belrun.

The bus has ten non-driver seats and some flex-space without seats in it. There are six hangglidiing students (the instructor's in his own truck with the equipment).

The driver starts up the bus and trundles it down the hill.

Merrin sits next to Belrun and is very attentive to everything happening around them, even though she has no specific indications to be worried.

...Okay, fine, if she's paying attention to all of her thoughts including the more inconvenient ones, she - is kind of worried that the fact that Belrun's husband was absolutely a romance novel male protagonist, means that they are now probably going to have an Adventure? 

The ride is very boring for the first while. Trundle trundle trundle. The driver is slow and careful.

Then a deer shoots out of the trees on one side of the road, and the driver swerves, and hits the deer anyway, and the whole bus is tilting, and Belrun is clutching her head and screaming and the bus luuuurches back toward the road -

- but not far enough before she passes out.

They tumble down about twenty feet, everybody shrieking and thumping around inside the cabin like naughty pears.

Merrin is mostly paying attention to the view outside all of the windows she can see from her current seat - 

- which was apparently not the most useful strategy, which should maybe have been obvious but it wasn't - but if she were smarter  if instead of her it were someone else, here, who was smarter–

Not the point. Not now. 

Merrin is pretty sure that Belrun did some kind of magic just then - probably the telekinesis kind - but it doesn't matter, Belrun is the important one here, Merrin doesn't want to die but she was ready to less than 24 hours ago and it's fine, it's FINE - she can wrap her arms around Belrun and shield her with her own body and it's FINE - 

The bus comes to a halt in some miscellaneous shrubbery. The deer is crushed under it and does not survive this experience.

The screaming eventually gives way to sobbing and murmuring as people try to assess each other's conditions. Looks like broken wrists, lots of bruising, one woman had dozed off and hit her head pretty hard and is just now semiconscious while her boyfriend whimpers over her.

Belrun's out but not badly injured, just - apparently tried to do too much magic.

AAAAAAAAAH– 

- ok great they're still alive. 

Is Belrun still alive?

(Seems like a yes, she's breathing and Merrin can still feel a pulse?) 

Is everyone else nearby still alive? ...Well, everyone in Merrin's line of sight seems to be, they're at least making noises or moving–

...Merrin really doesn't want to leave Belrun. But...maybe it's okay to lay Belrun down across the seats they were sharing, and then check her pulse and breathing again, before forging out across the no-longer-very-horizontal bus floor to get a sense of the other casualties.

To start: who isn't moving? 

Head injury lady is fluttering her eyelids but not otherwise moving around; she's groaning while her boyfriend tries to - get her to squeeze his hand? - and fumbles with his phone (broken).

Everyone else is showing any signs at all of consciousness - good - oh also good the boyfriend is trying to do some reasonable things - 

- the language difference continues to be really awkward??? Merrin makes her way over to them anyway, and tries to catch the boyfriend's eye and nod reassuringly to him before she reaches in to check the lady's pulse. 

Lady pulls away from her hand and groans more emphatically. Boyfriend doesn't seem confident enough to interfere but he is definitely watching Merrin out of the corner of his eye while trying to help someone else whose wrist looks busted to get their bag open to check for a non-broken phone.

Merrin hasn't previously seen phones and she isn't sure what they're for! They look like some kind of electronics, though. Maybe for communication? Hopefully? Someone communicating in order to get some HELP over here would be great right about now. 

Does the woman have a reasonably strong pulse and is she breathing okay and does her skin color look mostly normal? If so then Merrin can move on and stop upsetting the boyfriend who (very reasonably!) does not trust her. 

Pulse is fast, breathing is shaky and quick, she's damp but not too cold or too hot or a weird color (modulo the local ethnicity, which is a bit darker than Merrin).

Okay she's not dying, which means it's a correct priority anyway to go check on all the others. This one at least has a partner who will keep checking on her and hopefully raise an alarm if her condition deteriorates. 

...Merrin is going to go check on Belrun again first, partly because it would be really awful if she ended up stuck here with no one who could handle the language barrier, and partly because Belrun is the person she knows and she's therefore more stressed about her. 

Still alive, still unconscious.

Merrin wants to put a blanket over her but she doesn't HAVE a blanket, even though she could have if she'd thought to prepare - there were blankets on the beds back at the hanggliding-people-lodge - but she didn't know there was going to be a bus problem and even if it had been one of her considerations she had (quite reasonably, she thinks) assumed that the owners would be upset about it... 

Anyway, no blanket. 

- she turns around and spends a moment stuck while she nudges herself past the intense desire-affordance to enter some questions into the prediction markets that she DOESN'T HAVE, and she doesn't do that, and then she goes on to check the rest of the bus. Who seems to be both 1) visibly in a lot of pain, and 2) not accompanied by a less visibly-in-pain-or-otherwise-impaired person? 

This teenage boy! Seems to have fucked up both hands and is kind of melting down about it.

Oh no, poor kid! 

Merrin goes over and half-crouches so her eyes are more level than his and gently holds out her hands. She doesn't have any better way to communicate that she has medical training or that she wants to help, right now (if she had wanted to be prepared for this exact eventuality she could have stolen the first aid kit from the lodge but she didn't, did she, because that would have been a bad idea in expectation...) 

Does the kid look more upset at her nonverbal offer? 

He looks bewildered. He's visibly trying to get himself under control but he keeps looking at his hands and flinching and crying harder.

He should really be supporting his hands on a stable surface! They would hurt way less! Merrin would under normal circumstances offer him a splint, and in a low-resource-constraint scenario she would fold up a blanket or use a piece of wood or something, but this is WORSE than that and she has NO blankets. She has....her shirt, which she is currently wearing and does not super want to take off? 

Are there any fabric things or flat firm objects anywhere around her that look grab-able at all. 

With some looking she can find somebody's book, detect that the semiconscious lady's boyfriend has a scarf in his pocket, and see that the driver is currently trying to kick open a first aid kit.