"I figured. That's okay." Sigh. "You did really well at drinking the medicine. I want you to sleep some more, now, and hopefully you'll feel a little better in the morning, and we can go from there. Um, do you need to pee first?"

She is going to be kind of worried about his kidney function if he doesn't, but also it sounds logistically complicated. Maybe he can pee in a jar or something. While lying down. It is honestly starting to stress her out a lot that she cannot just place a catheter and have an exact hourly accounting of his urine output. Unfortunately that is also bottlenecked on having to personally reinvent plastic. 

"--Oh, yeah, I should probably do that." He stands up and immediately starts to fall over.

Wen Ning catches him.

"Don't do that!" Merrin was not quite fast enough to grab him before he tried to stand up but she can help catch him. "Your blood pressure is probably still really low, you're going to get dizzy and pass out if you try to be vertical right now. Fortunately you're a boy so it shouldn't be that complicated to just pee in a container. Wen Ning, can you help me find one?" - she protectively grabs the mostly-empty container of sugar-salt-fluid. "Not this one! I'm using it! A different one." 

Wen Ning grabs a container.

"Not that one! I have my insect experiment in it!"

...Wen Ning grabs a third container.

To Merrin: "Okay, but you have to look away, you're a girl."

Merrin resists the urge to retort that actually she is an EMT which doesn't count. She is not in the mood for arguments, she would like to get this task done as quickly and smoothly as possible. For the same reason, she does not ask about the insect experiment. She pointedly looks at the wall of the tent, though trying to make sure she can see enough in her peripheral vision to notice if Wei Wuxian is about to try something ill-advised like standing up again.

He does not stand up! He pees in the empty jug of alcohol. Poor jug.

At least he's not literally in kidney failure right now! That's something! 

Merrin briefly examines the jug but, due to the fact that it's opaque and the tent is not incredibly well-lit, it's hard to judge at a glance how concerningly concentrated the color looks. It SMELLS concerning but Merrin decides after several seconds that probably this is actually the fault of whatever the jug's previous contents were??? 

She puts it by the tent entrance to examine more closely later before dumping it out wherever one is supposed to do that in this camp, and she tries to convince Wei Wuxian that now is a good time to lie down and get comfortable and maybe snuggle Wen Ning for warmth and then SLEEP.

"If you sleep the entire night I'll teach you algebra in the morning?" she offers. "It's math. I think you'll find it really interesting. I need to plan out how to explain it though, so tomorrow. And only if you're cooperative and get some rest."

"Yes, xiansheng," he says sarcastically. 

Sarcasm is fine. Sarcasm means he can't be feeling that terrible, right? 

Merrin helps get him thoroughly wrapped up in every clean blanket in the tent, again, and waits until she's sure that he is in fact planning on lying down and snuggling and eventually sleeping, rather than going right back to his notes about airplanes and plastic.

And then she leaves, to dispose of pee (and gauge how healthy-looking it is), and then to seek out more food and get water to boil for herself to drink before she retreats to her own tent for the night. Not that she expects herself to be able to sleep anytime particularly soon. 

There are more women around the camp this time, all Jin; it seems from the scraps of conversation she overhears that they'd gone out on patrol. (They look at her oddly.)

Merrin has no idea if they're looking at oddly because she:

- Is wearing Lan robes? 

- Is wearing boy robes specifically?

- Is clearly foreign and a totally different ethnicity from anyone here. 

- Is not herself a cultivator (assuming they can tell by looking?) 

- Something else entirely??? 

Whatever. She smiles at anyone who makes eye contact with her, and accomplishes her quests, and then hides in her tent. She lies down on the hard uneven ground with her one blanket, and for a length of time that is somehow both surprisingly long and surprisingly short, she curls up and cries. 

It's dark, by the time she stops. Merrin sits at the mouth of her tent and looks up at the stars of an alien world - though the stars themselves are less alien than one might expect?? - and she tries to think. 

Here are some things that Merrin has learned about this world, in no particular importance but roughly organized into categories which she made up right now on the spot.

Facts that have massive implications for how physical laws work in this world: 

Humans have "souls" which contain a record of unknown completeness of their mindstate. This is obvious to commonsense perception and presumably verifiable by experiment.

Humans also contain energy called qi. 

There is some kind of developmental window of plasticity during which people can 'cultivate' their qi and create a 'golden core' and then have superpowers. 

The state of someone's qi is visible to someone trained in the right skill, and indicates their medical condition and health. 

Cultivators can also donate their own qi to another person, which seems to directly improve their condition? 

There are local doctors, who seem to be probably some specialized variant of cultivators. 

Dead people's souls can hang around being disembodied 'ghosts' if they have enough resentment. 

Dead people's souls can also be trapped in pouches??? 

On the other hand, if you could perfectly recreate the entire brain of someone who had been cryopreserved, this wouldn't work if you didn't also have possession of their soul. 

On the other other hand, dead bodies which possess neither souls nor, one assumes, a heartbeat or blood oxygenation or any functioning neural or muscle tissue, can still get up and walk around and do things such as "pin Merrin to the floor of a tent."

People can learn to cultivate "resentful energy" instead of qi, and by doing this can...control the mobile corpses? And also maybe experience the memories of ghosts that they have trapped in pouches??? 

Golden cores can apparently be....removed? And transplanted? This does not kill the donor, unlike most cases of organ donation when people only have one of them, but it results in the donor not being able to do normal qi cultivation. 

Relatedly, it's possible to destroy another person's golden core, although unclear how. 

Facts that are mostly about geopolitics between groups of people? (Merrin is unclear whether these are also downstream of different physical laws, they might be, but it also seems possible to posit that they aren't and are instead the result of a different historical context and tech level and the fact that nobody here seems to know the basic math on how trade and coordination work):

The basic unit of society, above the level of individuals, is 'clans'. (Which...may or may not be the same thing as 'sects', Merrin is realizing that she's unclear on that.) 

Clans she knows about: the Wens, the Jiangs, the Jins, and the Lans. 

People will visually distinguish what clan they belong to by what robes they wear. Currently Merrin is wearing Lan robes. 

The Lans all have to agree to follow a list three thousand unique rules.

The Lans used to live in a place called the Cloud Recesses, which was then destroyed by fire. 

It is maybe against the Lan rules to sneak out of the Cloud Recesses and obtain grape-flavored-alcohol to drink? (Honestly, Merrin is sympathetic to this rule.) 

The Lan Sect Leader is absurdly young, and in fact took the position when he was still school-age by dath ilani standards. This is somewhat unusual. 

The Jins have a supply train (whatever that combination of words actually means in context? This does not seem like a world that has the tech for actual trains.) Their supplies include sugar. 

The Jins initially kidnapped Wen Ning and were holding him prisoner and this somehow entailed assigning him to a job in their "supply" "train"? 

Wei Wuxian was affiliated with the Jiang clan/sect at one point, but they're now all dead because of the Wen clan? 

The Wen clan: are apparently just trying to kill everyone else? For reasons that nobody has yet been able to explain? 

Facts that are mainly about Wei Wuxian as a person and may or may not tie into anything else: 

He had his golden core removed and donated to the leader of his sect? This is apparently very very secret. 

This was done by one of the Wens, e.g. the clan that is trying to kill everyone else. Merrin actually just does not have an explanation there, other than 'maybe it was a long time ago and the political situation was different then', but this is unsatisfying.

He invented the type of cultivation that involves "resentful energy" and controlling dead people. 

This involved spending three months on a mountain surviving off eating people???? 

He can control corpses and this is important to the current war effort against the Wen clan who are mysteriously trying to murder everyone else. 

He is intensely upset about what happened to his clan/sect/family and presumably also about many other aspects of the situation, and as a result wants to personally murder the entire Wen clan. (For game-theoretic-timeless-incentives reasons? Merrin can kind of see that it makes sense to - be the sort of agent that makes this situation symmetric. Although Wei Wuxian does not seem to be aware of any of the math and also apparently neither is anyone else on this entire continent, because that is pretty much the only explanation Merrin can think of for the current situation.) 

Despite wanting to murder the entire Wen clan, he is nonetheless trying very hard to protect (and possibly dating???) one of the Wens who is now a prisoner here. 

He managed to nearly die just by not getting around to eating or drinking (anything other than grape-flavored sterilizing solutions) or sleeping. 

He seems to consistently wake up disoriented and scared enough to send corpses after whoever is waking him, though actually maybe that's only for Merrin, who's a foreigner he barely knows. 

He is ravenously curious to learn about science, and - probably natively a lot more intelligent than Merrin herself; he picks it up fast and he's surely not at his best right now. 

He likes food that hurts, to an even greater extent than most people in this culture like food that hurts. 

He thinks he will be an exceptional ghost. 

.....All right. Time to take a step back and orient to all of that and, hopefully, find a way of turning it into a realitymodel that will output any kind of usable probability-distribution-over-future-events. Because Merrin desperately wants to have a goal and a plan that is longer-timescale than the next five to thirty minutes, but it feels impossible to even attempt while she's still so confused about....everything. 

- She is noticing that she doesn't really want to be thinking about this. That she feels tired, in a deep and inexorable way, when she tries to anyway. She wants....

What does she want. That's a good place to start, actually. 

She wants her Civilization back. She may have spent nearly half of her total working hours since age twenty training for various increasingly bizarre Exceptions, and so she can function at all under conditions like these, but if it's real, if the patients she's treating here in this strange world are people like all the other people she's ever known, who will die if she can't save them and nevermind if they might still exist as ghosts or souls or whatever - 

- then she wants her nicely appointed ambulance with all of the normal basic medical equipment she takes for granted and understands, and she wants her expert diagnostician-doctors and she wants her prediction markets and...actually that's not something she can have in isolation, is it. It's possible because of what dath ilan is, at a deep fundamental level. 

And dath ilan ALSO doesn't have one group of people deciding to murder all the other groups of people, for reasons that presumably (or at least she hopes) make sense to them internally, but which cannot possibly still hold together once you understand - once you know, and know that everyone else knows or can at least be taught - the idea of making coordinated moves from the place they are right now, which is obviously visibly terrible, to somewhere that is better than that - 

- and that's not easy, there's complexity there and Merrin has no idea how many mistakes are lurking behind the veil of dath ilan's screened-off history, or how many hopeful solutions might turn out to be fundamentally broken. And some of it is obviously hard, even to her, she's pretty sure that prediction markets and reputation-tracking-systems are a component in how dath ilan is better than this and she knows she does not, personally, understand the fundamental truths of math and reality underlying why that works. And that's despite the fact that she lived in a place that used those systems, and was taught by an education system that tried very, very hard to help her understand. 

(...And, holding onto uncertainty, maybe it's actually much less clear than that, maybe her picture of what happened in the past and what's happening now is missing some hugely relevant pieces...) 

((Merrin hates uncertainty and having to track where and how she might be missing important and relevant pieces. She had lessons in how to think even under those constraints but she honestly kind of hated them, it hurt to think like that and not in the fun way, and even now she is not entirely sure how much of that is because she just wasn't smart enough and was pushing her cognitive abilities to their limits, and how much was...something else, about her non-intelligence personality traits, about how on some level her emotions want and need her to live in a world where everyone is a friend to help and work with and cooperate with...)) 

....Okay. She had all of the thoughts, even though it was hard. Now what. 

Divide it up by timescale. (This is probably not the best or even an especially good categorization but it feels like the one that will hurt the least, right now.)

In the short run, she wants:

- To have more and clearer information on the local political situation. Which probably means talking to a wider range of people, mostly? And....figuring out what correlates she can observe, in her local environment, to help her verify which version is true.

- (...She should probably try to get Wen Ning into an environment where he feels safe and comfortable telling her his actual raw sensory observations of what the Wen clan was doing up until he was captured and ended up here. That sounds like an agonizing conversation but if it's important then she can COPE.)

- To have plastic exist here.

- And the other local manufacturing prerequisites to make IV tubing and urinary catheters and various other things where she does, actually, know most of the important engineering specifications and can probably explain them. 

- To have a local boyfriend who will be trustworthy and impressive and hurt her her brain can SHUT UP about that actually. 

In the medium to longer term, she wants: 

This to not be the thing that is happening to her that is not a plan or a goal, try again. She wants: 

- For there to stop being a war where people murder other people. 

- For Wei Wuxian not to die. That....is apparently pretty important to her, actually. 

- To teach someone, probably Wei Wuxian, the basic thought that underlies all of dath ilan's knowledge and ability to acquire more knowledge. (That seems really hard and probably she's not thinking about it right, yet, she'll work on that.) 

- To understand the world well enough that she can start to make sense of it and generalize her existing skills and then develop additional locally-relevant skills. 

- To teach more people MATH so that whenever an important question comes out where getting the answer requires doing math she can outsource that. (Also this seems slightly time-sensitive because she might forget more things as time goes on?)

- ...To learn some kind of cultivation and acquire some variant of local superpowers. (Merrin is slightly surprised that she wants this? But it does feel....important, for having the kind of resources and reach that she needs even to take charge during very basic medical emergencies.) 

All right. Great. She has some inputs to her realitymodel, which she has now assessed and categorized, sort of. She has uncertainties to check. She has....any idea at all, of what her goals would be, once it even make sense to have goals. She mostly trusts her ability to make straightforward logistical plans, once she's there. 

....Why does everything still hurt. 

Oh right it's probably just the thing where she spent a while in a crashing plane being pretty sure she was about to die, and then she died, and now she is mysteriously stuck in another world and there are still PROBLEMS that need FIXING but she's never going to see anyone she knows or cares about ever again. 

Actually it makes a lot of sense, to be upset about that. 

(...She is still also kind of anxious about sleeping because what if an EMERGENCY happens, but she did get a decent look around the camp, and most of the people she saw seemed to have reasonably-to-very-good situational awareness, and also it's not as though she personally is going to be able to do much about an invasion of murderous other clans or murderous corpses, other than 'run away'. And given the utter lack of sound isolation in this tent, she will probably wake up in time to run away.)

That being settled, Merrin will curl up and cry some more and hopefully, eventually, fall asleep. 

If there are no interruptions, Merrin is likely to stay asleep for the next 9-10 hours. She is very very tired.

(She is, however, trained to wake up to any indication of a nearby emergency or anyone trying to get her attention.) 

She is awoken in mid-morning by the sound of someone building up a fire and boiling water.

Merrin starts to wake up and notices that the surface under her is not her bed, and also not plausibly anyone's bed. It would be an impressively terrible bed actually. 

She notices that there are ambient noises, which is weird, her own living space is well sound-isolated and most of the other places she could hypothetically be sleeping are better sound-isolated than that. 

...Recent memory starts to return. Beginning with the screaming around her, as the plane's dive toward the unforgiving ground below started to accelerate. 

- oh right she was treating a patient. Priorities. 

Merrin scrambles up and heads for the mouth of her tent to see what's going on.

Wen Ning spots her. 

"Dath Merrin, Zhuren knows where he is but not what day it is-- but that's normal for zhuren, he never does-- and he can count to ten and he knows the name of the clans. His qi is weak but flowing freely. He's breathing more deeply. He woke up twice with nightmares, which isn't unusual, but I held him and he calmed easily. His pulse is sixty but kind of weak. He's still pale and his hands and feet are cold-- more than usual, I mean, he's always had poor circulation. His feet and hands were mottled before but they're better now. Nausea, but no vomiting or cramps. Urine, normal color with no blood in it, but no feces."