Merrin, who is perhaps not yet entirely awake, blinks at Wen Ning for several seconds and then smiles.

It's the kind of involuntary smile that is visibly entirely unguarded (to anyone who is paying attention), and that conveys...relief, and recognition, and an incredibly specific flavor of joy and delight that an EMT in dath ilan would feel when meeting a new colleague who is coming in above and beyond all of their expectations. 

.....Oh right this is not dath ilan and she will never be able to go home ever again. 

Merrin's smile dims. Her expression and body language shift back to her previous baseline of calmcalmcalm and otherwise trying to be as unreadable as possible.

"Thank you, Wen Ning. Is he awake right now?"  

"I sang to him until he went back to sleep, Mistress Dath."

"....Good. Thank you." Merrin smiles at him in as reassuring a way as she can manage. 

Probably it's good? Merrin is still trying to wake up fully and retrieve all of the information she remembers on her patient's status, and it's NOT HELPING that her brain keeps, instead, reminding her that the Wen sect set the Lan Cloud Recesses on fire and small tiny children were probably horribly burned to death...

- Probably there are as many as several questions that she should ALSO not ask Wen Ning, who was kidnapped and  badly-treated-in-some-unclear-way (which Merrin is noticing that she feels averse to hearing about even though it's important), which - has visibly-even-to-the-alien (e.g. her) resulted in him having noticeable (even to the alien) negative reactions to any mention of the relevant events....?

- On reflection she should maybe just ask him. Since Wen Ning seems to be knowledgeable and capable, and also fairly unlikely to instantly have a medical emergency if she says the wrong thing. 

"....Wen Ning?" she starts. "I - have a lot of questions about your world and the recent events and, um, the war. Between the clans. I don't want to ask Wei Wuxian because it seems to be really upsetting for him and if he gets angry then he starts having heart problems. I...am aware that you probably also have a lot of personally traumatic experiences around this. Because - my current understanding is that it's a war between the Wen clan - which I think is your family? - and everyone else here. ...So I maybe shouldn't be asking you. But you seem to be - good at understanding things around here." 

Merrin has so many other thoughts in her stack but she is going to STOP THERE and wait to see how Wen Ning reacts. 

"--oh Mistress Dath you'd probably do a better job asking someone else like Sect Leader Lan? He knows a lot of things about politics."

"...Yeah, I've met him. He seems to be - trying really hard to do the right thing. ....And I think he probably knows more than anyone else about the Lan clan and its resources and goals? But I–" 

Pause. 

"- Actually I think I want to hear about this world from you because you just gave me a really good and reasonable medical report - which, um, where I'm from I think it takes significant training to do that? and my impression is that that's assuming people smarter than you? ....And that's - something I know how to assess. And so - you feel like a teammate. And Sect Leader Lan doesn't." 

Although he's distractingly athletic and attractive and if she could pick one (1) replacement boyfriend here it would be  .......stop. just stop. 

"My sister is the best doctor in the world, Mistress Dath, and I help her. Helped."

"Yeah. You'd mentioned that. I - want to meet her? She sounds like someone I would get along with. Except for, um, I - I don't understand the war between the Wen clan and - everyone else. Sorry. From your perspective it probably seems like I am missing something very obvious but - in dath ilan we don't have wars–"

"...what do you do if someone wants to be very powerful?"

What is this question. 

".....Um. In dath ilan, I - guess - there are probably a lot of people who want to - be smart and powerful and socially-influential enough that they can - make reality a particular way, that they think is better? But I think that's....not a problem?"

If anything Merrin has spent most of her life feeling like the thing wrong with her is that she would prefer to be small and unimportant and for her traits and choices and actions to matter less. And that she would be better and more admirable if she wanted more of the world. 

Pause. Thoughts. Emotions Merrin is going to be very professional about putting all of her personal emotions aside, right now. 

"...And, um, I guess that mostly dath ilan tries to set up the incentives such that - shaping reality to your will - only works if you're doing it cleverly and in a direction that Civiization overall would endorse -"

Merrin thought that she had totally handled her emotions about this world but now she, apparently, is crying??? 

Wen Ning hugs her. "That seems like a much better way for the world to be," he says. "Around here you mostly get powerful enough to shape reality to your will by being-- really good at killing things."

She's being hugged! This is amazing!

Merrin....had not realized just how badly she needed a hug. Which is probably a failure of realitymodeling on her own part? But to be fair to herself she has never actually been in a situation where her primary emotional bottleneck was 'enough hugs.' 

though she really misses all of her boyfriends .....that continue to not be the point. 

Hugs. Hugs are nice. 

"......Doesn't killing things - by which I assume you mostly mean people - hurt?" she manages, eventually. 

"Mostly I mean monsters and fierce corpses and ghosts and gods and things. It's really quite unusual for cultivators to kill other cultivators. --Or, I guess rogue cultivators kill each other all the time, but clans, I mean."

Merrin has more questions! Again! This keeps happening! 

“…There are rogue cultivators?” she manages after a few seconds of putting her thoughts back in order. “Also, what - are gods. That’s another word that, um, it’s translating at all but not into anything I know how to make sense of.”

"Rogue cultivators are just cultivators who don't have a clan or a sect. Gods live in the Heavens and get more powerful if people worship them? Normally they're not much of a problem but if they start killing people or something we have to kill them."

This is not on net reducing Merrin’s total number of questions! …Actually she thinks that explanation was maybe just geared toward someone who has more context on this would then she does.

”Do they get more powerful in a way that’s different from, um, just like how political leaders can be sensibly described as more powerful if they’re leaders of a larger area with more people in it? And what are the Heavens?”

"Yes, Mistress Dath, it's different-- the gods have various sorts of magical powers and ability to affect things. They can prevent famines and pestilience and that sort of thing. Heaven is sort of in the sky? Except if you're not a god and try to get to Heaven by flying up it won't work, you'll just go into outer space and die unless you've cultivated enough that you don't need to breathe."

“- Wow. Have people in your world actually been to space? That’s…kind of incredible. In my world we definitely could not go to space at this tech level.”

The fact that you can cultivate qi to the point of REPLACING BREATHING is another fact-about-physical-law, that is probably less completely insane than it sounds and would be predictable if she understand whatever is underlying the other differences, but right now she doesn't and it sounds incredibly bizarre. 

"....Wait can cultivators also fly?" That feels more surprising, actually. It's not obvious to Merrin how it would fit in with the cluster of other cultivator abilities that have been mentioned before. 

"On swords? And of course we've been to space, if you go up long enough you'll get there."

Merrin did not predict that! This keeps happening. For this particular bit, she's...actually not sure why she didn't. She was aware of the flying swords. They obviously do not have the same design specs as planes, given all the magic. She's pretty sure that just about every dath ilani she's ever met would, if they were shown a magical way of flying to space, be in space however many minutes later it took to cover that vertical distance. 

(It's very frustrating that she can't go to space, not that she could go right here and now - she has a patient to check on - but still.) 

"Planes can't go to space," she says. "I'm....not actually sure of this, but I'm guessing that my world had atmospheric flight a while before we had space travel. Anyway, can humans get to the Heavens another way? Or is it a gods-only sort of place?" 

"They can go if a god takes them."

Merrin is trying to form a mental diagram of the process here and is sort of flailing about it. 

"Okay. Right. On the one hand this is maybe a digression away from my actual very-short-term priorities here and we should stop and go back to you explaining to me how likely to is that we'll get attacked in the next day, I want a clearer probability estimate on that before I try to put most of my brain into figuring out your world's physics. ....On the other hand how and why, and what - you've told me a bit about what makes gods powerful and their capabilities but not their goals. Which seem more relevant to guessing how likely it is that a god will try to do things to me or you or someone I've met in a way that makes the next events diverge from normal non-god-related causality, since right now I'm roughly modeling gods as 'powerful enough to do whatever they want' and I don't know what they want." 

"They want worship from humans and other than that they want the kinds of things anyone else does? Friendship, love, power, not being humiliated, for the things they care about to be safe..."

"....Huh." Merrin rubs her eyes. "I'm noticing that you answered exactly the question I asked and I somehow don't feel any less confused about this. Did gods, um, grow out of humans or something like humans? Or are they - a completely different kind of lifeform?"