She wakes up on a flat, grassy plain, not far from a teenage boy who begins speaking to her very rapidly in an oddly musical language. 

What. 

Is that...some sort of conlang? It's very pretty which would be a design criteria but it's totally unfamiliar. 

Also. What. 

She looks around some more. Still no sign at all of the remains of a plane, or anything at all on fire. 

"I'm sorry," she says, trying not to sound as irritable as she feels, "can you please tell me in Baseline what just happened?" 

The boy takes out a piece of paper and starts to draw odd shapes on it.

This is still not helping! Those are not letters Merrin recognizes. Also not a drawing of a plane crashing. 

She sits up and tests her limbs for injury and runs through the last day in her head to check for any memory gaps. Well, other than the OBVIOUS one where she has no idea how she got from a crashing plane to this field. It's very surprising that nothing is on fire. She's pretty sure that planes contain quite a lot of highly flammable fuel. It's more surprising that she's not noticeably injured. 

The boy attaches the talisman to her shoulder and then bows deeply.

"This unworthy one is sorry to have touched you, Mistress Foreigner," he says, very quickly, "and humbly asks if you happen to be a doctor."

He looks very freaked out.

"If you can speak Baseline why didn't you start with– nevermind."

Merrin is noticing some ADDITIONAL confusion. She's trying to very quickly reason through how probable it is that she has a head injury of which the only noticeable symptom is a complete inability to make sense of her situation. And maybe amnesia? Could she have wandered far enough away from the plane crash site and then fallen asleep here and forgotten that? This...does not seem medically plausible. She is, however, running low on alternate explanations. 

"Um, I'm a paramedic so I do have medical training but I am strictly speaking not a doctor - also in case you didn't see it happen, I should disclose that I was in a plane crash and I don't remember how I got from there to here and so it's possible I am not actually in a state where I can safely provide treatment to anyone. Where are we?" Another fragment of her brain catches up. "...Oh! Is there another survivor from the crash? I can come right away, I'm probably not worse than no medical attention even if I may be impaired." 

"Mistress Foreigner, this lowly one is sure that foreign lands have superior talismans but this insignificant land's worthless talismans struggle with unfamiliar vocabulary." He says this so fast that it's all almost like one word. "Zhuren didn't survive a very-large-sword crash, this insignificant land only has swords that fit four or five people at once. He was so busy with work that he did not eat or sleep and his devotion to his great cause surpassed even his incomparable abilities in inedia."

Merrin gets a strong sense that "zhuren" means that the other person owns this boy like he's a table and "inedia" means living without food or sleep or water.

Medical triage, at this point in Merrin's career, is not a process that actually requires having explicit thoughts. Which means that she's already responding to the stranger even as the entire rest of her mind is going into a tailspin and dive at least as dramatic as the literal one she just experienced along with the plane. 

"That does sound concerning. I'll come with you and see what I can do - can you describe his symptoms more while we go?"

She stands up. Her body cooperates without complaint, which doesn't make any sense; if she had a medically-implausible head injury that somehow gave her hours or days of amnesia and not a headache, it would still need to have been long enough for bruises to stop aching, in which case she ought to instead be hungry. Right? That's how biology works? 

....She is fairly sure that 'how biology works' does NOT include people having the mysterious ability to live without food or sleep or water. Although someone thinking they could would explain the ill-advised attempt. Maybe? Sort of? Not really though??? 

What does it even MEAN to own someone like a table she is not going there right now, there is a medical emergency to assess first. 

Why is he calling planes 'swords' not going there either. Medical emergency. Priorities. 

- her attempts to put all non-medical queries on hold stumble when she catches up to processing the bit about the...translation talismans? Is that some kind of Advanced Technology from the sort of science fiction she never reads? 

She is starting to feel intensely uneasy but finishing this line of thought is being bottlenecked on the fact that most of her attention is on listening to the boy's answer to her question. 

"Mistress Foreigner, zhuren's still breathing but shallowly and his qi is flowing but-- not well-- but he's unconscious and he won't wake up when shaken and he's pale and clammy and blood is dripping from his mouth."

Well that is a description that is not reassuring in the slightest! Merrin walks faster. Maybe she should run. Though she has no idea where she's going, so actually she needs to go at the same pace as the boy, but she can try to indicate with body language that she's ready to hurry as much as he wants. 

"I see. Do you know how long he's been, um, trying to go without food or sleep? Were there signs of something wrong before this?"

A corner of her mind is stuck in a quiet strangled loop of CONFUSION and most of her attention is now on making sense of those symptoms, which are also confusing but a much more tractable kind. 

"- Wait, sorry, his what isn't flowing well?" 

"His qi. Um-- Mistress Foreigner if this unintelligent one tells you something important for zhuren's treatment will you swear by the Heavens and your ancestors and the gods of your land not to tell anyone else?"

Oh! Mistress Foreigner wants to run? This boy is happy to run as fast as Mistress Foreigner can keep up with.

She's not going to outright sprint or anything, she wants enough breath to talk, but she's in good shape and can speed up to a jog. 

"- I'm not sure I understand what you're asking me to do - standard medical confidentiality means I won't share anything unless it's with another medical professional and it's actually necessary for his treatment, is that all right?" 

"Oh, no, this humble one begs you not to share it with anyone, Mistress Foreigner, even another doctor. Sect Leader Jiang would be so angry he would probably kill this useless slave!"

They're approaching a camp-- tents, fires, wagons of supplies. Merrin's confusion about the "very large sword" might be deepened by the fact that several people are observably flying while standing on their swords like a skateboard.

"....Um, I - don't think I understand anything about this situation well enough to feel comfortable making any serious promises like this, but I - don't want to make anything worse by intervening, that would also be against medical ethics - and normal ethics - why don't I just come look at him first and if I think he's in critical danger and I can't get him stabilized without knowing the thing I'll say so and otherwise you can tell me later once we have a chance to talk about it more -?" 

There are people. Flying. On swords. Like skateboards. That is not how swords work and also not how gravity works and is possibly even more baffling than the plane-crash memory discontinuity. 

...Merrin is seriously considering the possibility that she's hallucinating, in which case she knows what she's supposed to do, but it's not actually a satisfying explanation, this is very implausibly detailed and coherent and indistinguishable-from-actual-events-actually-happening, and also she is KIND OF BUSY and now is not a good time to pause. She wants to see the patient first and if he's not imminently dying then she can worry about that before actually attempting any treatment (and she should definitely do it then, since it would be fairly irresponsible to carry out any medical treatment when already considering the possibility that she's completely out of touch with reality, but she cannot actually bring herself to stop before she's seen what she's dealing with here -) 

"Yes, that sounds good, Mistress Foreigner."

He directs her to a tent.

Around the vicinity of the tent are several dozen corpses standing up and staring aimlessly into space.

Inside the tent is a seventeen-year-old boy who is, as reported, pale and clammy and breathing shallowly and bleeding slightly from the mouth and extremely unconscious. He has been neatly tucked in. Also inside the tent is a layer of notebooks, random papers, musical instruments, half-eaten food, empty bottles, dirty clothes, pornographic drawings, etc.

Wait WHAT NOW– later. The mysterious corpses are not the patient she's being called in for. 

Merrin dives in, which involves stepping on multiple obstacles, there's not enough clear floor for stepping around to apply but she can at least direct her feet toward notebooks and papers and drawings rather than bottles or food. She squats at his side and checks his pulse. 

"There's food in here," she points out, somewhat inanely. "You think he hasn't been eating much, though?" 

"Zhuren has been practicing inedia for the past ten days. This useless slave had been assigned to other tasks and was shamefully unable to bring him his meals, a failure for which I will undoubtedly be punished greatly. --Zhuren's devotion to his clan is great," the teenager adds, in case there was any confusion about this point.

There is a pulse! Not as much of a pulse as one would ideally hope but, you know, a pulse.

"This humble one fed zhuren qi and made sure he was comfortable and then went to look for a doctor when he didn't wake up," the teenager says, his scripted words not doing a very good job at all of hiding how incredibly freaked out he is. 

"Hey, it's okay. It's not your fault. You're handling this really well," Merrin says, without any particular thought going into the words. She does not reassuringly pat the teenager's shoulder because he seems to have some very weird presumptions around physical touch. "You were entirely right to get a doctor. I don't have any of my supplies on me because of the plane crash, I would normally start with IV fluids and nutrition but given the sense I'm getting of the, um, general tech level around here, I sort of doubt you have that. Do you have oral rehydration solution. ...That's not going to work right now because he needs to be awake to swallow but we can figure something out." 

You know! On reflection! Actually it would be GREAT if this were an implausibly detailed and realistic hallucination! Because the alternative is that she is, apparently, trapped in some kind of bizarre horrible alien civilization with a teenager who seems to be terrified of punishment including literal death for things that are in no way his fault! 

"- Do you have any more blankets," she says in a rote tone, "we should keep him as warm as possible. And then I want you to sit with him and, um, keep...feeding him qi, if it seemed like that was helping, I just - I need to - I'll be right back." Probably. If she's not right back it's because this is not actually real. She doesn't say that. It would not be reassuring. 

"This unintelligent one is ignorant in matters of medicine but I haven't heard of oral rehydration solution. This humble one has a meager medicine kit." The teenage boy somehow manages to quickly find the medicine kit and blankets in this mess of a tent. "Zhuren likes to be warm at night," he explains, and then realizes he gave irrelevant information to the doctor, and then says, "this humble one apologizes for his impertinence."

He sits next to the unconscious boy and holds his hand and sings to him. He has a very pretty voice.

The medicine kit turns out to contain needles, incense, candles, stones, and a whole lot of neatly labeled herbs and oils.

Awwwww. 

"That's okay," she says soothingly. "We can make it, it's literally just water and sugar and salt. ....Clean water. That part's important. If your drinking water here isn't reliably clean then we need to boil it to make sure it's safe." 

Merrin's planned ungraceful escape from the tent is delayed while she inventories the medical kit. It is not helpful. What is she supposed to do with any of this. Maybe the herbs are medicinal? She glares at the labels. 

"Mistress Foreigner, you need... water that non-cultivators won't get sick if they drink?"

"Y....es? I - think I'm missing a lot of context here. Is that going to be hard to get–" 

She stops herself. 

"- Actually, never mind. Answer that question in a minute. Just stay with him and - do the thing you're doing." It's magic. It's totally flaming magic, isn't it. "I need a minute to take care of something." 

Merrin ducks out of the tent and stifles a shriek. She forgot about the CORPSES STANDING AROUND STARING. She's not sure how she forgot that, it's kind of memorable, but to be fair there is a lot going on right now. 

She manages not to scream and instead to emit only a quiet, strangled "eep", and then she takes ten seconds to catch her breath. 

Glares at the stupid corpses. 

"Tsi-imbi," she says, clearly and very grumpily, "and if this is some kind of horrible LARP, it's not funny and I'm angry about it." 

...Merrin wishes she were more surprised by the fact that nothing happens. The corpses do not seem moved by her commentary. 

She turns around and stumps back into the tent. "Sorry. I just had to - check something. Any change?" 

"No, Mistress Foreigner. Do you want this useless one to boil water?"

Merrin would really like it if he stopped saying that but having that discussion is probably not a priority.

(Is this a fiction trope? If so it's not one from a genre she has any familiarity with, not that this is saying much. It's not that she dislikes reading, exactly, it's just that she's been intently focused on her career ambitions since she was fourteen, and grinding her way to being okay at her job despite her disadvantages has taken a lot of stubbornness and diligence and extra hours of study, and not left very much time for side hobbies. Most of the fiction she does consume is medical-themed.) 

"Yes, please. And find me sugar and salt. I'll stay with him. I - have a lot of questions - but I think we should deal with that first." 

And she is going to take the opportunity while he's out of the tent and she doesn't need to worry about keeping him calm, to tug aside various bits of blanket and examine the unconscious kid more thoroughly. She's confused and worried about the bleeding; the rest all fits with the scanty medical history she's been informed of, but neither starvation nor dehydration nor lack of sleep should cause that, so the least-worrying scenario is that he...fainted and fell and bit his tongue in the process? And the more worrying explanation is that he picked up some serious injuries. She's not sure how but maybe it has something to do with the WALL OF DEAD PEOPLE STANDING AROUND outside the tent. Her local guide might not know, given that he confessed to not having been around that much. 

(She is quietly hoping in the back of her mind that this isn't real and she's about to wake up in a hospital somewhere having miraculously survived an unsurvivable plane crash, but she's no longer really expecting that to happen. Which mostly leaves her anticipations full of ?????????? and noise.) 

The teenage boy looks at a flute on the floor, and then Merrin, and then the flute again, and then the unconscious boy, and then Merrin, and then apparently decides to go find water and salt and sugar.

Before he leaves, he bows and says, "Zhuren's courtesy name is Wei Wuxian."

Wei Wuxian is extremely pale and emaciated; she can see a somewhat terrifying number of his ribs. He's covered with scars, including several which seem to be human bite marks and others which seem to be from attacks, with weapons and without. He doesn't have any recent injuries.

He moans softly as she's examining him.

(...What is up with the flute. It looks like a normal musical instrument to Merrin. Or, well, actually it doesn't look like anything she's ever seen before, but it's a plausible design for a flute in Bizarre Low Tech Magic World. She's not sure what the boy is worried about. She can ask him LATER.) 

This is concerning. Merrin has concerns. She is making a mental list of them. The signs of old injuries aren't an immediate medical concern, but she's updating that the broader situation they're in is probably a medium-term medical concern. For herself as well as her patient. She needs to obtain clarification on what's going on here as soon as the other boy gets back from his water-collecting mission. 

Moaning is a promising level of responsiveness. With a bit more concerted effort she can maybe wake him enough to actually consume some homemade oral rehydration solution, which is an urgent priority because he's clearly very dehydrated as well as emaciated. His skin is cold to the touch, which she suspects is mainly because he isn't producing much body heat, due to this being a metabolic process that requires calories. She gets him wrapped up again with every single blanket in the tent, and since the other boy isn't back yet - Merrin is very fast at examining people - she moves on to tidying up the floor so she can move around more easily, stacking all the papers and notebooks in one pile and the clothes in another and shoving the dubious half-eaten bits of food into a corner. 

He returns. "Mistress Foreigner, this unworthy one has built a fire outside, if that's all right?"

He looks terrified at her cleaning, opens his mouth to say something, thinks better of it, and closes it.

"That's fine." 

Merrin notices his look of terror. It's hard not to notice. "I, um, are there things in here I should be careful about touching? I'm just trying to clear enough floor space that I can actually move." 

"Oh, Mistress Foreigner, Zhuren doesn't like it when things move so he can't find them. This slave can put it back when you're done?"

"- I'll apologize to him about it when he's, um, actually conscious enough to care. I think finding his things is not his biggest problem right now." Merrin is slightly mystified at how the level of chaos from before would make it easier to find anything but people have different preferences for personal organization. 

She sits back on her heels. "He's not immediately deteriorating. I'm not going to try to wake him until we have some safe water ready for him to drink. In the meantime, do you think you can keep an eye on the fire and answer some questions I have at the same time? I have - kind of a lot of questions. I'm from somewhere....very different from here, I don't know how I got here except it clearly has something to do with the plane crash. But you shouldn't assume that I know literally anything about what's going on, even if it seems very obvious to you." 

"Yes, Mistress Foreigner, this unworthy one can do his meager best to answer your questions."

"Thank you." 

Merrin reminds herself that this boy is clearly incredibly freaked out and scared for his friend's survival, and she should be gentle and reassuring and NOT immediately dump all of her confusion on top of him. 

"So the first thing is - I am a trained paramedic, but I suspect that the practice of medicine is very different where I'm from. I don't know what a 'cultivator' is or - why that affects whether someone can drink contaminated water without getting sick. Where I'm from, nobody can go without food or sleep, but it sounded like you were saying that people here can, to some extent, which means I am probably missing some things about how.....biology works. I don't have the faintest inkling of an explanation for the, um, corpses standing outside this tent– I assume they're dead? They look very dead. Also it - looks like there's a major violent conflict going on around here? Or something? That seems important to have some background on." 

"If you cultivate-- uh, meditate and study and train martial arts?-- you can control the flow of qi through your body and use it so you don't get sick or need to eat or sleep or age, and if you're particularly good at it you can't die at all. The corpses are because zhuren is the grandmaster of demonic cultivation. He figured out how to control resentful energy so we can control fierce corpses and not just suppress them or lay them to rest."

Right. Magic. Great. 

Well, Merrin doesn't actually need to have a model of how she got here in order to learn some ground facts about here and start trying to make sense of them. Probably. 

"I see. And you were - giving him your qi, before? Does that help when someone is sick?" 

"Yes, Mistress Foreigner. More qi helps along the body's natural healing processes."

Which makes about as much sense as anything else, once MAGIC is on the table. Merrin nods. "And you can see qi and use that to tell how badly off he is? ...I can't. See qi, I mean. I guess probably most doctors here can. I'm just trained to pay attention to lots of other things." 

"You don't know how to sense qi, Mistress Foreigner?"

"....No. I don't know if it's a thing that exists in my world. We don't have cultivators, either. And we do have people who meditate and do martial arts so I think someone would have noticed." 

- could she learn it, now that she's apparently stuck here? Merrin has no idea if that's how things would work, given that this entire situation is already violating her sense of how things work in a dozen different ways. It sounds useful. And intriguing. Also terrifying. 

"- Um, if there's a trick for doing it, you could try to explain it to me and I'll see if I can pick it up?" 

"It requires many weeks of training, Mistress Foreigner."

"...All right. Not something that makes sense to try now, then." The concept of still being here in many weeks feels VERY FAKE. Merrin isn't sure if this is a reasonable way to feel or not. 

She looks down at the unconscious boy, and picks at the edge of her sleeve. "...I think maybe you should tell me the thing that might be relevant to his treatment but that you want to keep a secret. Since I'm, um, now a lot less sure that any of the laws and medical ethics I'm familiar with would even apply, here, I - think I'm more comfortable promising that I won't tell anyone. Although it'd help if you can say why it would be very bad if I told anyone. Please don't assume it's going to be obvious to me. Absolutely nothing about this place is obvious to me yet." 

"--Zhuren doesn't have a golden core, Mistress Foreigner, and you can't cultivate without a golden core."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah this is confusing worldbuilding. Merrin hates confusing worldbuilding. She was just starting to have enough moving pieces to put them together into predictions and now she's TRYING to make that fit and it DOESN'T and her attempt at building a model of the magic is grinding to a halt. 

"....I think I need you to back up and flesh out more how the cultivator magic thing works. I - thought you said before that he's the master of, um, demonic cultivation. Whatever that is. But if you need a...golden core, whatever that is, to do magic here, then I don't understand what he's doing with the dead people." 

"You need a golden core to produce your own qi from inside of you, Mistress Foreigner," Wen Ning explains, "but demonic cultivation uses resentful energy produced by ghosts and fierce corpses."

"What.....is 'resentful' energy? I think there's a weird translation thing going on there. Who or what is it resentful of. Also what are the problems it causes if you can't produce qi in your body and, um, how does not having a golden core even end up HAPPENING." 

"Resentful energy is the energy of ghosts and fierce corpses and other dead people? It is called that because the more full of hatred and resentment they were in life the more powerful they are after death. Zhuren is as weak as a non-cultivator-- he can't fly and he gets sick from bad water and he'd die if someone ran him through with a sword. Not even a spiritual sword-- uh, a magic sword that non-cultivators can't use-- a regular sword."

"Zhuren doesn't have a golden core because my sister, the best doctor in China, cut it out and implanted it in Sect Leader Jiang after Sect Leader Jiang had his golden core destroyed by a cultivator who can destroy golden cores." The teenage boy says this with obvious pride. 

What the FLAMING POOP does that even MEAN and why would you do that to someone even if it were possible has this entire world heard of the concept of medical ethics Merrin is not going to ask right now. She has enough concerns on her mental stack. Until she finds a tidier way to chunk them, she's not going to hurry to add any more. 

Merrin takes a deep breath. 

"Um. Right. I...see why that's important to know for his medical treatment. Although it doesn't actually change my plan very much because where I'm from that's all true of everyone. Anyway. I - am gathering that it's a secret, that he doesn't have a golden core, and so he's been - going along like he doesn't need to eat or sleep, but that's going to cause exactly the same problems it would for a normal non-cultivator person?" 

She considers asking if they can just get his sister, who is apparently the best doctor in...wherever 'China' is...but she has also apparently never heard of the concept of basic ethics and has in fact done something horrible to Wei Wuxian specifically, and Merrin is not at all sure she wants to let someone like that near her patient. Any of her patients. But especially the one whose entire problem was apparently his sister's fault. 

"Please don't tell Sect Leader Jiang! It would destroy him to know that zhuren had made that kind of sacrifice for him, he always feels like he has to be responsible for his own achievements. --Most of the time this humble one makes sure he eats and sleeps and boils his water, but this humble one had-- duties-- elsewhere." 

"....Wait, does this 'Sect Leader Jiang' not...know...that your sister did this? It seems - hard to miss." 

"Mistress Foreigner, we told him one of the immortals-- people with cultivation so powerful they can't die-- gave him a new golden core."

Merrin is of the opinion that actually this is an EVEN WORSE violation of - not even just medical ethics, it's just - what - why would you do that and if you were going to do that why would you LIE - 

Maybe it makes more sense in context but she's somehow not feeling very hopeful about that. 

"All right. I am not going to run off and tell him right now because whether or not that should have happened, it did happen, and it doesn't sound like more chaos is really what we need right now. Although I do want to say that in my world that would be a horrifying abuse of medical professional standards and I'm not impressed." 

She takes another deep breath. Merrin prides herself on her ability to rapidly orient and handle even the most bizarre situations, and this is sorely trying her skills. 

"Are the corpses or the demonic resentful energy thing going to present any complications to his medical treatment that I have to worry about in the short term, or can I ignore that for now and treat him as though he's a perfectly normal non-cultivator person who made some questionable life choices." 

"This unintelligent one thinks he's like an ordinary non-cultivator, Mistress Foreigner? --Do you use needles and incense and herbs in medicine where you're from? If you don't have qi, medicine might be different."

"I think medicine is really different, yeah. We - use needles for some things but - not just needles by themselves, they're for administering drugs, which I don't have. I am guessing the herbs are medicinal and might serve a similar purpose to drugs I know but I'm not familiar with them. I don't have the faintest idea what to do with the incense or the random stones. Unless one of them is salt. I considered licking them all to check but then I did not do that. How long until the water's boiled? And did you find sugar?" 

"The stones are for scraping across the skin to balance qi? --I think the water is almost boiled, Mistress Foreigner, and I stole some sugar from the Jin supply train, the young masters like it in their tea."

"Okay."

Right now it is not her top priority to find out why there's no better way of getting medically-required supplies than stealing them, although Merrin makes a mental note to ask more about the local infrastructure and legal system.

"If it's not easy to get salt I guess that'll do for now. Once that's ready - and the water is cooled down a bit - I want to try to wake him and get him to drink it, he's really dehydrated right now. And then he's going to need food, something easy to swallow, but that can wait a bit longer. ...You didn't answer my other question. About what's going on here. I - noticed a lot of old injuries, when I was examining him, and right now I still have no explanation for why. If we're likely to be in danger while he's recovering then that seems important for me to know." 

"This slave can make zhuren congee, if that would help? --I got salt from the supply train as well, that was easier to get." The boy swallows nervously. "We're in the middle of the Sunshot Campaign, where the Nie, Lan, Jin, and Jiang clans and their allies are making war on the Wen clan and its allies."

"Oh, good, perfect. Um, is there any chance you have a scale here? Normally I would do the quantities by weight. I can estimate it based on volume if I have to but it's not going to be as accurate, salt or sugar have different density depending on humidity levels and things." 

...Right. Non-medical information. This takes longer to process and Merrin is a lot less happy about it. She checks on Wei Wuxian while she's thinking; gauging whether his skin is any warmer, and checking his pulse and observing his breathing for any change, don't require much working memory. 

"...I don't know what any of those clans are or what your relation is to them. Or - to him, actually, we haven't done proper introductions. I don't know if that's immediately relevant. My name is Merrin." 

Wei Wuxian is a little bit warmer and starting to make whimpering noises and move his fingers a little bit. A nice thing about teenagers is that they do bounce back very quickly from their bad decisions.

He unburies a scale from under some robes, scraps of paper, and chunks of gold. "Mistress Foreigner, this humble one is Wen Ning, of the Wen clan of Qishan. The Sunshot Campaign captured this useless one as a prisoner of war. It's-- a little more complicated than that, but that's more or less this useless one's position. This unintelligent one was Wei Wuxian's personal servant. Or-- this unintelligent one was? Before this humble one was transferred to logistics. --Is that your clan name, Mistress Foreigner?"

Prisoner of war. Aaaaaaaaaaah??? 

"Merrin is my personal name. I don't think we really have clans." She accepts the scale and thanks him and starts folding some of the scraps of paper into makeshift cups to measure out salt and sugar. "Show me how big your container of water is? Thank you. Um, can you keep giving him qi while I do this? I think it's helping." 

Estimating the volume of said container and then calculating the appropriate, very-roughly-approximated weight of salt and sugar for the concentration she wants - she has to use her necklace as calibration for the scale, which has completely different units - takes all of her concentration for about a minute, but from there it's just busywork, filling her makeshift paper cups a tiny bit at a time until the weight is right, and then dumping and mixing. The water is still much too hot for drinking, but this is if anything helpful for dissolving solutes in it. 

And she can multitask while she does that. "....Listen, um, Wen Ning. While he's still out and we have privacy, I - have to ask - are you all right? Are you in danger here? Is Wei Wuxian - or anyone else in the camp - hurting you?" 

"You have to have a clan, Mistress Foreigner, or no one will know how to be polite to you!" He holds Wei Wuxian's hand and seems noticeably more comfortable now that he's doing that. "Zhuren would never hurt this useless one, Mistress Foreigner, and he tries to keep this useless one safe from the others in the camp. This humble one is very happy to be here with zhuren."

"...That's good. I'm glad."

Merrin spends a few seconds considering whether he might still be too afraid to tell her the truth, if he were being mistreated, and decides that she believes him. He - definitely gives off the impression of being someone who has had some intensely traumatic experiences, given the air of constant anxiety that he radiates, but he also seems very attached to Wei Wuxian, and more relaxed when near him.

"I don't - hmm. I...guess you could say I'm from the dath ilan clan. But it's not - the same world as where we are now, I'm pretty sure. We have more material wealth - a lot more - and we don't have, um, inter-clan conflicts, but we also don't have cultivators. Or, what did you call them - fierce corpses." 

She stirs the water some more. Checks its temperature against the inside of her wrist. "- All right. I'm going to see if he wakes up more with enough stimulation. He probably isn't going to be very happy with me about it and he might be confused or disoriented about where he is, so - stay right where you are. He knows you and he doesn't know me." 

She carefully sets down the container of water out of her way, and then kneels by the bundle of blankets. She checks his pulse again - maybe a little steadier, hard to tell - and then reaches under the blanket and drags her knuckles along his sternum, hard, and SHOUTS. "Wei Wuxian! Wake up!"

Merrin keeps her other hand firmly planted on his shoulder, in case he goes straight from unconscious to fighting her, which would be pretty understandable. She always feels really terrible about doing this. 

Wei Wuxian looks up, sees an unfamiliar face, whistles three notes, and then Merrin has been GRABBED by a fierce corpse and SHOVED to the ground. 

"Who the fuck are you and what the hell are you doing in my tent?"

....This is a novel experience for Merrin but is not, actually, the scariest thing that Merrin has ever faced while treating a patient. She didn't realize the corpses could do that! It's unsettling but also honestly very impressive! 

She holds extremely still and is very glad that she set the precious hand-mixed oral rehydration solution far out of the way. "Please try to relax," she says calmly. You're very ill and you collapsed. I'm - a doctor," not exactly true but best to go with simple explanations when talking to confused patients, "Wen Ning brought me here to treat you. Wen Ning, can you tell him what's going on." 

"It's all right, zhuren, she's a doctor, she's here to help."

"Ningning! Are you all right-- if the Jin clan touched you I am going to rip them all apart, I do not care--"

"No one touched me, zhuren-- uh, some of the Jin clan tried to take liberties but I told them I was yours--"

"Good. You're mine and no one else is allowed to touch you."

He is very angry and, relatedly, about to collapse into unconsciousness again.

That is not going to help with anything. 

"Wen Ning, keep talking to him - tell him to take deep breaths and that we need to help him sit up a little to drink something." Is the fierce corpse going to let her move now. 

"Oh, right." Wei Wuxian whistles again and the fierce corpse lets Merrin up and meanders outside. 

"Aiyaaaaaa, doctor foreigner, I'm fine really. Just needed a nap. Bit hard to sleep without my bedwarmer over here. Ningning just gets worried, I'm sorry to bother you." 

And then he immediately collapses, obviously.

"You are super not fine -" Merrin starts, and then trails off, since apparently now is not the time to have that conversation. Or any conversation. 

...Bedwarmer? Is that a technology thing or is he talking about Wen Ning? 'You're mine and no one else is allowed to touch you'??? Are they....dating. Is this just locally considered a normal kind of interaction for someone to have with their personal prisoner of war???? 

That is not strictly speaking a medical-emergency-related concern and so Merrin will set it aside to think about later. She sighs. "Thank you, Wen Ning. At least he knows who I am now and hopefully he'll remember and not panic so much about my presence in his tent. I think he's probably responsive enough to swallow safely without choking, I just - need to be careful not to startle him like that again. Here - I need you to help me get him sitting up a bit, you're going to need to hold onto him..." 

Merrin has enough experience at wrangling semiconscious people to do this gracefully, though she really doesn't appreciate doing it on a still-very-messy tent floor rather than with a proper hospital bed. She guides Wen Ning through propping Wei Wuxian against his shoulder, and then goes hunting through the detritus in the tent for a spoon or usable substitute for one. 

She finds a spoon that's serviceable other than being covered in dried food.

Wen Ning is petting Wei Wuxian's hair with one hand, holding his hand and presumably feeding him qi with the other, and murmuring soothing words too quietly for Merrin to hear. 

Fine. Okay. Consciousness. Wei Wuxian, grandmaster of demonic cultivator, can do this. His eyes are open and everything.

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. That's very cute. ...Seriously, are they dating. Normally she would not put very high priors on that, men who are romantically attracted to other men are rare, but who knows what the base rates are in bizarre questionable fantasy world. 

She scrapes most of the dried food off the spoon with her thumbnail and then rubs it as clean as she can on the hem of her shirt, and then rescues the vessel of sugar-salt-water of carefully measured concentration, and settles herself next to him as comfortably as she can. This is going to be incredibly tedious. 

She coaxes a spoonful of liquid into his mouth and praises him for swallowing it and counts out thirty seconds in her head and does it again. It would be very convenient if at some point he wakes up enough to hold the container and drink himself, but she's not really expecting it, and it's probably better for her to stay in charge of the rate, anyway; he's probably very thirsty, but if he tries to chug it then he's likely to throw up and then they'll be back to square one. 

Right now, Merrin would give up most of her life savings in exchange for a couple of liters of IV fluids, less because it's a critical medical need - you totally can treat a starved and badly dehydrated person with oral fluids - and more because she is SO BORED. This is going to take, like, an hour. Longer if he can't consistently stay awake for it. 

Wei Wuxian is bored much more quickly than she is. 

"Ningning, I want congee," he says after the fifth spoonful.

"The doctor says you can have some later?"

"You should put spices in it," he says to Merrin. "Or feed it to me faster."

“I’ll think about it. When did you last eat solid food and when did you last drink any water?”

"Uhhhhhhh."

"I'm sorry, zhuren."

"It's not your fault, Ningning, it's those asshole Jin's fault and I'm going to kill them."

“Well, you certainly look like you haven’t been eating anywhere near enough for weeks if not months. And you’re badly dehydrated, though for most people that really only takes a day or two. If you can get down half of this and not throw up over the next thirty minutes, you can have - actually, what is congee?”

"Rice porridge? You put things in it."

“Oh. That seems almost ideal, actually. In a few minutes. Digesting food is actually going to be hard on your body if you haven’t been eating much for a long time.” She frowns at him. “How are you feeling? Do you know where you are and -“ she has no idea what the local calendar is, “- and do you remember what’s happened here over the last few days?”

"I'm in my tent. The Jin stole Wen Ning so I spent a lot of time threatening to murder people until I got him back? And there were a couple of fierce corpse attacks and a battle and someone found a cemetery they thought I could use."

“That sounds very stressful.” She gives him another spoonful. “I guess it’s not surprising you weren’t getting much sleep. But you really need to rest for a while now. Until you’ve gained back some weight. Or you’re going to collapse again as soon as you try up if anything strenuous.”

She gives him more sugar-salt-water. Holds eye contact with him. “Listen to me. You can’t just brush this off. This is serious. You could have died.”

"Aiyaaa, I'll be fine. Haven't died yet."

“I am really not finding that a compelling argument. You’re staying put for at least the next couple of days.” Merrin doesn’t actually expect that to be a problem. She’s pretty sure the kid would pass out if he tried to stand up, right now, and that he’s going to fall asleep the instant they let him lie down and stop bothering him.

“Here, can you hold this?” She offers him the container, wrapping his hand around it with her own h hands overtop to hold it steady. “You can drink some more. Not too fast. And tell me if you’re feeling nauseated at all.”

"This humble one can give him herbs to help with the nausea?"

"Stop that, you're mine, you outrank some random foreigner even if she's a doctor."

"Yes, zhuren."

“I have never seen any of these herbs before and I have no idea which ones are treatments for what. Unfortunately I don’t usually carry an entire medical kit with me when I fly, and anyway my carry-on luggage doesn’t seem to have made it here. I guess I’m lucky my clothes did.”

She supervises Wei Wuxian in sipping some more oral rehydration solution, ready to gently pull it away if he tries to gulp it too fast. 

“How often do there tend to be, um, fierce corpses attacking?” she asks Wen Ning. “Or other attacks, I guess. Trying to figure out if we need to plan for guarding him while he’s recovering. He absolutely should not be getting up today and probably not tomorrow either.”

"Other people can handle it for two days, there are a lot of cultivators."

"Two entire days???"

"I have zhuren's notebooks and we can experiment with a new talisman? --If that's all right, Mistress Foreigner."

“That’s - research? Yeah, I think it’s fine to work on things if you’re feeling up to it, if you can do them without running around. Though you also clearly need more sleep than you’ve been getting lately.”

She tries to redirect his attention back to the container of now-barely-lukewarm water. “Wen Ning, can you make sure he doesn’t drop that all over himself? I’ll have another go at reading the labels on the herbs and see if I can figure out which is for nausea.”

She can apparently make sense of the written labels even though they’re clearly in Baseline - presumably, magic is involved - but it makes her vision feel oddly blurry and her eyes hurt.

"Two parts ginger, one part ginseng, one part licorice, in a tea," Wen Ning suggests.

“I…will take your word for it.” Presumably anything in the medical kit is not literally poisonous. It turns out that she is capable of deciphering which ones he means. “Is there another fire-safe container to boil more water for that? Actually it might be simplest if you make it. And the congee. I can take over here, now that he’s less disoriented.” Merrin has lit wood fires before but has never before in her life made tea over an open fire, and now is not really a great time to try picking up a new skill that she will almost certainly screw up in some unforeseen way. 

Wen Ning busies himself with cooking.

"I've been sleeping plenty," Wei Wuxian objects. "I like being awake at night."

Merrin does not believe him at ALL but she isn’t going to have that argument right now. She settles herself beside-and-behind Wei Wuxian so she can support his shoulders against one knee and still mostly have her hands free. About a third of the water is gone, which is progress, at least; she helps Wei Wuxian take another sip and then takes his hand to check his pulse and skin temperature.

He's still quite clammy, and his pulse is there but not at all as strong as she'd like.

He almost looks anemic. Giving him a blood transfusion is super not on the table, though. 

Merrin is only a little bit on edge at the possibility of being surprise jumped by more dead people. Or whatever else has been regularly going wrong around here. She has training for operating in hazardous situations but this is a new one. 

“Are you okay to sit up a little longer?” she asks Wei Wuxian. “Tell me if you’re feeling worse and need to lie down flat, all right?” 

"I'm fine. I could go for a run."

DOUBT. Merrin does not actually need to have that argument with a stubborn teenage boy right this second, though. 

(Merrin has met teenage boys before. Teenage boys from dath ilan are not generally this miscalibrated on their condition unless they're operating at a significant cognitive impairment, but Wei Wuxian might be, right now, his blood sugar has to be very low. If he's in a state where he's not actually processing information very effectively, it isn't going to help to keep repeating facts like that, and will mainly result in injured pride. If he actually gets up and attempts to go for a run, she'll have to intervene, but she doubts he's going to try and is even more dubious he would make it more than two steps.) 

She rearranges the blankets so he's very covered, and vaguely wishes there were a convenient way to raise the ambient temperature in the tent, but it's obviously not safe to put a fire inside. 

"Want to tell me the story with you and Wen Ning?" she says, in between feeding him sips of water. "You clearly care a lot about him. And he's been trying very hard to look out for you. But I - if I'm getting the clan names right, the clans here are fighting his clan, and he was captured or something? What happened?" 

"He's my slave," Wei Wuxian says stubbornly. "I can feel about him however I like. Even if he's a Wen-dog."

That wasn't even slightly an answer to her question! 

"Of course you can," Merrin says soothingly. "I'm very glad he has someone to protect him, here, and it speaks well of you. Is it....normal, here, for people captured when fighting to be made slaves of the people who captured them? How does that work?" 

She also has a growing list of questions about why exactly the clans are fighting, this doesn't seem like an equilibrium state at all - maybe the random 'fierce corpses' wandering around have something to do with that? She needs to ask more about them, too. Are they still sentient? Can they be coordinated with? Merrin is going to save her complicated questions for Wen Ning, though, or she can ask Wei Wuxian LATER when he's more lucid. Possibly the question she just asked is already too complicated, but she feels like she needs to talk about something, to keep him awake and entertained so he stays put and drinks fluids. There's clearly something wrong with his attention span. Maybe getting some more glucose into his bloodstream will help. 

"We took him prisoner after the Wen clan slaughtered the Jiang clan-- that's my clan-- and I needed someone to cook for me and keep my bed warm. I deserve it. I'm winning their war for them, aren't I?"

Somehow that is not actually addressing any of Merrin's points of confusion. 

"....Your clan all got killed? Is that - like - your family? I'm...sorry?"

What are you even supposed to say to that. Merrin thinks she is doing very well by saying WORDS and not just INCOHERENT SCREAMING. 

...The corpses presumably come from somewhere. Merrin has...been trying not to think about that too hard. Or about the fact that this world clearly lacks the tech base for cryonics to be feasible at all. Cultivators apparently don't age. What happens to everyone else? no she cannot think about this right now she is working. 

Wei Wuxian should drink more oral rehydration solution. Merrin is being remarkably cheerful and patient and persistent about coaxing him to do this. She is trying very hard to hide any sign of frustration with the task, even though practicing low tech medicine is the WORST. 

"Yeah. But I tracked down everyone responsible and killed them and I'm going to destroy the Wen clan."

He continues to eat his oral rehydration solution.

They're making progress! Maybe she can even trust him to hold the container by himself for a minute so she can free up her hands and rearrange his blankets so he's more thoroughly tucked in. She watches very closely and keeps a hand nearby in case this is over-optimistic, though. 

"Are you cold right now?" she asks him. "Any headache or dizziness?" Not that she trusts him to give her an accurate report of his status, but she might as well ask. 

"I'm a little dizzy? It's fine. I've fought while I was this dizzy before."

"Mistress Dath, can I put spices in the congee?"

“You would probably fight a lot better if when you noticed you were dizzy you ate and drank something.” Merrin says this with only the faintest tinge of exasperation making it through into her voice. 

To Wen Ning, “- Sure, I don’t see any problem? If they’re just normal cooking spices and not ones that have bizarre medicinal effects. And maybe don’t make it too spicy, it can irritate people’s stomachs, though I’m guessing he’s used to it?”

"He likes it so spicy no one else can eat it."

"Wimps."

"Ummm, can you maybe set some aside that isn't spicy, and if he keeps that down okay he can have the rest made the way he likes it?"

Merrin is very sympathetic to patients wanting to have food made the way they're familiar with and prefer, but she is also pretty sure that 'so spicy most people can't eat it' is not going to be gentle on this kid's already-abused digestive tract. He can have lots of the weird herbs tea too, maybe that will balance it out. 

"Make it all spicy, Ningning. --If you want me to eat you should let me have good food."

"Here's your tea, zhuren."

"Gross. The weird foreign medicine tastes way better."

He must be very electrolyte-deficient if the stuff tastes good to him, Merrin thinks. "I'm sorry. Just try to sip some of it and then you can go back to the tastier one." 

He can have tea and congee and lots of encouragement and Merrin will desperately hope that this does not result in her being vomited on. She only has the one pair of clothes. 

He does in fact throw up on her clothes and then says, "that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't made me drink gross medicine."

"I really don't think that's why, but noted," Merrin says dryly, hiding any visible signs of annoyance or discomfort about the clothes. She can deal with it later. At least he drank nearly all of the sugar-salt-water, and hopefully enough of it stayed in his system. "I think no more solid food right now and you should lie down for a bit. We'll need to wash the top blanket but I think the others are all right." 

She eases him down onto the floor of the tent. Gets him arranged on his side, in case he vomits again and isn't alert enough to keep his airway clear, and tucks him in with the unsoiled blankets. She spares thirty seconds for being grumpy about the fact that she can't give him iron supplements. Actually he's probably deficient in every vitamin and mineral that exists. It's a reasonable assumption to make and she's going to have to keep operating based on priors because she can't run any tests, due to being trapped in Low Tech Fantasy World. 

She scoots over to where Wen Ning is and lowers her voice. "Can you sit with him and, um, maybe you can sing to him and stuff again? It might help him fall asleep. He's very distractible." 

Speaking of distraction--

"Get Mistress Dath some real clothes. Lan robes, probably. And commission her some robes in my colors."

"Zhuren, the Lan are gender segregated and we have a male battalion at the camp. The Jin are here?"

"Why do they even bother."

"Sexual purity?"

"The virtuous Lan boys could fuck a Jin girl. Or a whore. Or each other."

"Try to get some sleep," Merrin says, tiredly. "My clothes are not an emergency. What are Lan robes anyway? And, um, I - have questions about the 'gender segregated' part but I'm...not sure I have specific questions yet so much as, just, what. In general. But that question is also not an emergency." 

It turns out to be almost impossible to think while Wei Wuxian is awake and talking, and Merrin is pretty sure she has a significant backlog of thoughts that she made previous mental notes about and needs to finish having. 

"I will sleep when you have robes that don't have vomit on them!"

"I don't want her to look like a peacock. Get her the male Lan robes, they look the same."

"Zhuren, I have a sleeping draught for you, if the doctor says it's all right?"

"I don't need a sleeping draught. I feel fine. Well-rested."

"You may feel that way but you aren't. My medical opinion is that you would benefit a lot from resting more. Wen Ning says you haven't been getting a lot of sleep. If you have spare, um, robes, that's very generous and I would be grateful." And she can figure out what...political signalling?? they involve later, by asking Wen Ning, who gives much clearer answers to questions.

She turns back to Wen Ning. "...Um, what are the side effects of that? Without being familiar with it I can't say for sure that it's safe - um, if he's taken it before and been fine then it's probably okay now? He may be more sensitive to sedating effects because he's so undernourished, but you could presumably just give him less." 

"It allows the body to rest so the qi can rebuild."

"I have plenty of qi."

Wen Ning puts the sleeping draught in front of him.

He drinks it. Under protest.

"Thank you," Merrin says fervently to Wen Ning. "Wei Wuxian, are you warm enough?" She checks whether he still feels clammy. 

"I could use Wen Ning?" Wei Wuxian says hopefully.

"Zhuren, would you prefer I get Mistress Dath robes or warm your bed?"

"Ugh, fine, get me another blanket."

He closes his eyes.

"How long will it take to get robes? Um, if there's sewing involved I know how to sew." Her experience of sewing with fabric, rather than suturing injuries, is very limited, but she does, technically, know how. "I do think it's also important for him to be warm enough, he can't afford to be burning extra energy on staying warm." 

"We'll grab an extra set from the laundry, Mistress Dath. It won't quite fit but it'll do until proper robes arrive. And once you're settled in I can warm zhuren's bed."

"- Sure. I don't need that much to get settled, I don't think? I could use...food. And I am also a normal person and not a cultivator, so I'll get sick if I drink contaminated water. And I need at least one blanket to sleep with. I don't mind sleeping here if that's where there's space -" probably even if the teenage boys are dating they are not going to have sex in front of her. Right? Wei Wuxian is kind of starving to death? Merrin is pretty sure that decreases sex drive and probably that's sufficient even with teenage boys? 

...If her patient and his maybe-boyfriend want to have sex in front of her, well, it's their tent, she will assume the local culture considers this fine and be a professional about it. 

"I take care of zhuren's water and his food, I can easily take care of yours too. I think we should get you a tent because you're an honored guest."

"Oh. That would be good, thank you. I, um, don't know how to put up a tent." 

"I will be your servant as well as zhuren's, Mistress Dath. The Sunshot Campaign needs doctors far more urgently than it needs people to put up tents."

“I guess you would, that’s fair. Although, um, I’m - worried my ability to usefully be a doctor is going to be affected pretty negatively by how different medicine is here. I’m used to having equipment. And prediction markets so I’m not just making everything up on the spot with just my own judgement - and even if I’m training for a case where those are offline I would have reference material!” Merrin lets out her breath in a gust. “It’s not - I mean, I’m not going to be totally useless or anything, but I’m…not really a doctor, either by dath ilan’s standards or by the ones you use here.”

This hurts a surprising amount to admit out loud, but it’s important, right, not to start out deceiving anyone about what she can or can’t do. Including - especially - herself. 

"...what's a prediction market?"

“Ummmm. Do you want the high level summary or the simplified version with some math or the more-true version with lots of math?”

"High level summary? I was never good at math."

"Right. Okay. Um, it's - a way of aggregating the knowledge and best information of a large number of people, by setting it up like an actual market, where people win money for being right so experts are incentivized to participate - there's a bunch of math involved for deciding who gains or loses how much money, and they update in real time as more information comes in, so you get real-time best guess answers to questions and recommendations for action. If he," she gestures at Wei Wuxian, "were a patient where I'm from, I would be feeding in real-time information on his condition as it changed - although if I were back home that'd be mostly automated via monitoring equipment, and also I'd have way better treatment options than making him drink low-quality hand-mixed oral rehydration solution." 

"...you get scholars to trade in a market like they're peasants?!"

What in the name of dirty wet wipes is a ""peasant"". Is the translation magic providing any informative connotations here. 

The cultivator who created the talisman is pretty sure EVEN barbarians have peasants. Probably they have more peasants.She is left without a helpful sense of connotations.

FINE then she will have to ASK using her actual mouth. 

"Um, what's a peasant? I...am not really getting anything helpful from your translation talisman thing and I'm confused." 

"The ones who farm and make clothes and raise animals?"

".....Right." To Merrin that sure sounds like THREE DIFFERENT categories, two of which are (she assumes) food-production-related and one of which is a low-tech-craftsperson role, which makes it kind of a baffling catch-all term. "I - guess peasants, as experts in those fields, would be pretty well-placed to trade in markets for - grain? fruit and vegetables? whatever you grow here - and clothing and animals? That must still be a really small percentage of total market share, though. And - prediction markets aren't the kind of market that buys and sells concrete physical goods, they trade in information, which sounds like the sort of thing where 'scholars' would have the most expertise and comparative advantage? Assuming I'm correctly understanding what scholars do, here." 

"Scholars run the government, mostly? And write poetry and paint and teach other people about philosophy. If you're a cultivator or a gentleman you don't do trade because trade is for peasants."

"What? I - but - that doesn't–" 

Merrin stops herself. Takes a deep breath. Getting into a stupid debate with her local guide on the specifics of their native culture, where he is the expert and she isn't, is unlikely to achieve any of what she wants.

"...I think maybe there's a weird translation thing going on here? Do you have an entirely separate system of expertise and training and expert-skill-evaluation for farming versus Governance decisions?" 

"I... don't know what peasants do? They're peasants. I don't think there's that much difference in how good you can be at farming? I know that gentlemen sit a competitive exam and the ones that score best get to be in the government and the others... do something else? Tutor children?" He sounds very uncertain.

"Huh. My impression is that there's a lot of difference in how good you can be at farming. I think agricultural productivity per unit land area and per capita is a pretty important factor for overall surplus? ....Um, sorry, I guess you just said that's not your area of expertise. The thing I was trying to say is - probably more like the competitive exam thing? I assume it's not the same exam every year and there's some sort of system to keep updating it and figure out the best questions to ask to actually measure expertise in Governance or teaching or whatnot." 

"I think they have lots of different... essay questions? About the Confucian classics?"

"....Right." He is probably also not an expert in Governance qualification exam design and it won't help to interrogate him about it, even though she's so curious. "But - once scholars have passed that exam and are making policy decisions, there's got to be some kind of process they use to resolve things when two different Governance experts disagree?" 

"I... know what we do?" Wen Ning offers.

"Oh? What do you do? - I guess it'd make sense for it to be different, here, actual full-on prediction markets take a lot of overhead - if I had to rebuild Civilization it'd take me ages to include that, and it'd be a worse version, I don't actually understand or remember all the math for it." 

"Well, all the sect leaders and clan leaders govern as seems right to them. If they do a good job their clan will be richer, more disciples will want to join, other sects and clans will want to ally with them, and outlying branches won't leave to become their own clans or sects. The clans negotiate with each other about subjects that matter to everyone, like whose territory is whose. And everyone talks to each other and picks out who they think ought to be the chief cultivator, who's in charge of all the cultivators. Currently, Wen Ruohan is the Chief Cultivator, but he started slaughtering other clans so there was a war to replace him with a different Chief Cultivator. --Also there are wars if one cultivator clan wants more territory or if there's a serious dispute about tribute or something."

Merrin is nodding along to this right up until the final sentence. 

"....Wait, what? Is - that - is that how the conflict happen? How the one happening right now started? I.....am somehow even more confused, that just - sounds predictably negative sum in a way where I would expect someone to notice and not do it - wouldn't it be cheaper for everyone to, um, agree in advance who's in an overall position such that they would theoretically win a conflict like that, and then just write up a contract with an exchange-of-value that both sides agree is preferable to actually doing the war....?" 

Even as she's saying the words, Merrin is already pretty sure that she's missing something, and also explaining the parts she does understand very badly. 

"Maybe peasants do that? I think they don't have wars with other peasants very often."

Merrin isn't sure if this makes perfect sense or if it leaves her even MORE confused. That in itself seems like a bad sign. 

".....Sure, but why aren't whoever's in charge of the clans on this side of the conflict doing that too?" 

"We can't do trade, Mistress Dath. We're cultivators."

".....Okay, um, never mind." Maybe she can try having this conversation with Wei Wuxian later, once he's awake and less out of it. "Thank you for explaining." 

"The laundry is over here," he says. "People from different clans wear different clothes so you can see what clan they're from. Um, but dath ilan doesn't have its own uniform yet? So for now zhuren wanted you to wear Lan clan clothes, just so you have something clean, and we can commission clothes from the peasants. He wanted black and red which are his colors? But you can wear something different if you want."

Wei Wuxian and Wen Ning in fact both are wearing red underrobes and black outer robes with a red sash and their hair tied back with a red ribbon.

Merrin doesn't especially feel like spending more effort and thought on colors for clothing. "I mean, nobody here is going to recognize a dath ilan uniform even if I come up with one on the spot? So it won't...help, with that. I guess Lan clothes are fine although - I maybe want to know more about the Lan clan before I agree to that?" 

"They have three thousand rules that they're supposed to follow at all times but a lot of them are duplicates. All Lan wear a headband, so it would be pretty obvious that you're not a Lan. They might think you're a servant, except that you're a foreigner and your hair is mutilated, so they'd probably think that someone just loaned you some Lan clothes. The Lan are supposed to be generous with the stranger so that isn't that odd. --Sect Leader Lan is likely to be the only person other than zhuren interested in a foreigner from very far away where they don't have cultivation."

Merrin is trying very hard to listen politely and attentively while noting down all the elements of that sentence and where she's confused so that she can organize her questions and ask them LATER, but her working memory is kind of overflowing. 

"....Right. Thank you." She mostly doesn't grimace. "I - probably should at least know what the three thousand rules are if I'm going to be wearing robes that signal I'm supposed to have agreed to follow them? I, um, what - is the thing people are actually going to expect if they think I'm a foreigner who's borrowing clothes from Lan?" 

Also what the flaming toilet paper does he mean about her hair. Her hair is fine. It's very practical. She had it trimmed like two weeks ago. Wei Wuxian's hair, on the other hand, is a disaster Merrin is not here to judge. 

"That something strange is up and probably they should ask Sect Leader Lan about it? --Possibly we should take you to meet Sect Leader Lan."

"....Right. I should probably meet Sect Leader Lan."

If she's understanding and correctly interpreting the connotations of 'sect leader' then maybe he will be able to actually explain the current situation with its bizarre inexplicable interpersonal (inter-clan??) conflicts that, to her, feel like they HAVE to be a failure of communication except why would anyone fail at that it can't be that hard...

"...Anyway. I am not actually upset about my current clothes," this is mostly true, she is deciding not to be upset because it wouldn't help, Merrin is very experienced at deciding not to be squeamish, "and it can probably wait? I...think I would rather keep wearing these clothes than stumble into some sort of cultural misunderstanding that I don't have any context on." 

"We can go take you to Sect Leader Lan now probably?"

Near the side of the field a teenage boy with a forehead ribbon is stabbing trees with a sword as tall as he is, with a general manner as if the trees had murdered his family. 

He is phenomenally beautiful. Wen Ning would have to facebland, but the stabby teenage boy looks inhuman. People do not look like that. 

Merrin is mostly very asexual and yet that is STILL UNFAIRLY DISTRACTING. Why. 

.....Why is he stabbing trees. Is this some sort of training drill. For what. Merrin....actually does not super want to think in detail about the most realistic training drills for stabbing other humans, but surely stabbing trees is very dissimilar? 

....he could do things to her involving a sword .....that would actually be much more ill-advised than Merrin is comfortable with and also WHY IS HER BRAIN PROPOSING THIS. This is NOT THE TIME. 

She stands awkwardly and smiles at him. 

Merrin is not a tree, and therefore the teenage boy is completely uninterested in her. 

"Sect Leader Lan?" Wen Ning prompts.

Merrin does not really want to go anywhere close to the sword! He seems very focused on whatever training drill he's doing and not focused on avoiding accidentally hurting anyone! 

"...Hello?" she calls out. "Um. Hi! I'm Merrin! I'm a -" okay FINE, "- I'm a doctor from another world! And I'm supposed to talk to you!" 

NO ONE IS SUPPOSED TO TALK TO HIM ACTUALLY.

"--um. That's Sect Leader Lan's brother." He says very nervously, "sorry, Second Master Lan! This useless slave will just be going now. Very sorry to bother you."

Why won't the worst person in the world shut up and leave him alone. He has trees to murder here.

Oh. Is he not the person she's supposed to talk to. Merrin is going to quietly follow Wen Ning away and feel INCREDIBLY AWKWARD, despite the fact that she's telling herself firmly that she had zero local context and thus had no way of knowing that she was being incredibly rude. 

(This doesn't really help. Being accidentally rude is almost as bad as being knowingly rude. At least according to Merrin's emotions, which she has tried very hard to refactor, and thought she had succeeded but apparently she had instead mostly succeeded at UNDERSTANDING THE RULES.)

Wen Ning talks to a servant and then gets directions to where Sect Leader Lan is currently exercising. 

Here are some facts about Sect Leader Lan:

-Sect Leader Lan looks identical to his brother, except that he looks pleasant and happy to see you, instead of like he is about to coldly commit genocide against some trees.
-Sect Leader Lan exercises in nothing but a pair of white cotton pants. 
-Sect Leader Lan can do a one-armed handstand for, judging from the amount of time they took to approach, at least five minutes. He doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat.

Merrin does not normally think of herself as someone who is easily distracted by attractive people! AND YET! To be honest she kind of resents being proven wrong about this!!! 

....She is going to stand there and smile and very politely wait for him to be done exercising. And not ogle his abs. Okay maybe she will ogle his abs a tiny bit. With plausible deniability. 

He notices them, graciously flips into a standing position, and bows deeply. "Good morning, Master Wen. Good morning, Mistress. I don't think I've had the pleasure of your acquaintance," he says, as if it is a perfectly ordinary interaction for a shirtless man to be approached by a foreigner with an obvious translation talisman and vomit on their shirt. 

Merrin is a highly trained endurance paramedic! She is capable of being a professional and maintaining dignity even in extremely weird circumstances! 

(....For some reason, none of her training scenarios ever included absurdly stupidly attractive shirtless men with abs. Possibly that was an oversight??? She should tell someone. If she ever gets to go home.) 

"- My name is Merrin," she says, and...imitates the weird motion he just did, as well as she can. "I'm - not from here - my current impression is that I am from another world that doesn't have magic," and instead has SANITY AS A CONCEPT the entire line of thought generating that is uncharitable and probably mostly downstream of Merrin feeling upset about her life right now and she will ignore it. "- I was a doctor there. Roughly. Wen Ning found me and asked me to treat..." 

She cuts off because medical confidentiality, and glances over to try to catch Wen Ning's eye. "- Um, he can explain, I guess?" 

"Zhuren is ill," Wen Ning says.

"We sincerely appreciate your efforts, Mistress Merrin," Sect Leader Lan says. "I confess I'm not sure what it means to be from another world. Are you from the ghost realm, or the Heavens? Or the Americas?"

He's so distracting. His FACE is distracting. This is not something that Merrin has ever been prepared for. 

"I - um - I don't...think I'm from any of those? To be clear I do not at all have a model of how or why I ended up here and in fact it violates basically everything I understand about the world and physical reality. Sorry. I - should I just tell you the things that I observed and experienced and then you can do the interpretation?"

(He's an authority figure which is almost sort of like being a Keeper?? Merrin....is aware that she is reaching very hard, here, but she very badly needs someone who can take in all of her information as inputs and be smarter than her and output something that makes SENSE. And the person described as a 'Clan Leader' is as good a candidate as any? Right? This is definitely not about how good his abs are.) 

"Master Wen, I am sure Master Wei needs you," he says in the tone of someone who expects to be obeyed. "Mistress Merrin-- is that your clan name?-- excuse me for a moment while I dress and order some tea prepared. Would you like a change of clothing and something to eat? I can order a bath drawn up but, I apologize, it will take longer. We are under military conditions."

"- That's fine, I understand." 

(Merrin says this via automatic and apparently automatically-translated social script, as a stalling method to buy herself time to actually think.) 

"....Um, yes, I would like that - sorry, no, I don't need a bath. It's fine. I understand that you're resource-constrained. ....The main thing I need is to better understand the local geopolitical situation? Can you tell me why the Lan clan is fighting the, um, sorry, I forgot what the other clan is called - why you're fighting them instead of agreeing on terms and then not doing that?" 

He bows. "Thank you, Sect Leader Lan, Mistress Dath." And then he flees because Sect Leader Lan is terrifying.

"This way, Mistress Dath. --The overall situation is complicated, but fundamentally the Wen clan burned the Lan clan's home and tried to burn our books and killed many of our disciples, and we need to make them pay, so that other people do not think it is a good idea to try to burn our home."

- Merrin is going to start up a hypothetical and keep track of what she's hearing in a hypothetical logical scenario. For now. Until she– she's not sure what the exit condition is here, actually, and whether it's 'until she explodes' or 'until she doesn't explode and understands what's happening.' 

"Yes. I - hear you." Which is true. It would be false to say 'I understand.' "Can you explain some background - why did the Wen clan do all of that? What were their objectives?" 

"The Wen clan is led by Wen Ruohan, who is concerned that the other clans would become powerful and challenge his rule, and wanted no one to be powerful in the rivers and lakes but himself."

"...I - um - I'm sorry but that does not actually make me feel less confused. Why does Wen Ruohan," Merrin pronounces this very carefully, "- care so much about other clans and their influence? I - my understanding is that 'rivers' and 'lakes' are a generic term for geographical features - which specific rivers and lakes did he want to personally have power over and why?" 

"'The rivers and lakes' is metonymy for the world of cultivators. --I suppose translating things literally when possible is a good trait in a translation talisman. Clears up misunderstandings quickly." He shakes his head. "I hesitate to speak too much of a man I do not know well, but I think Wen Ruohan wants to be powerful so he can be safe. If he is the strongest, he thinks, no one can kill him. The Wen clan is not a kind place to grow up."

Merrin is, again, trying to listen and hold onto everything being said and finding that she doesn't quite have enough space in working memory for it. 

"....I understand, in general, I think?" She is not at all sure that she understands the 'world of cultivators' which rivers and lakes are a shorthand for, but. That can wait. "I understand that - being stronger gives a person more options - and that would, would - be important - if he were under threat -" 

Pause. Merrin is trying to take a deep breath and this is, for some reason, hard. 

"- Can you tell me about the Wen clan. And - why - it isn't kind....?" 

"Where you're from, are there-- clans? Sects? Schools?-- which have different ways of teaching and being?"

Merrin stares intently at him, clearly listening very hard to the (incredibly baffling!!!) concepts that he's trying to convey.

"- Yes? There are different specialties and areas of expertise, and - people choose one to learn based on their native traits and skills and comparative advantage....?" 

"Wei Wuxian was raised in the Jiang clan, which tends to be-- brash, bold, disrespectful of hierarchy. Their words are 'attempt the impossible' and so they do. The Lan, my clan, conversely, are bound by our rules. We speak softly, we are polite, we don't run, we eat food without spices, we go to bed and rise at the same time each day. You see how these produce different people?"

It's a beautifully eloquent speech and it really isn't helping Merrin feel less like this is a strangely compelling hallucination. 

"....I - guess? - No, actually, I don't, sorry. I - isn't the entire point of Law that it - makes people stronger, so that Civilization as a whole can achieve what seemed impossible before–"

Focus.

"....I think food with spices is fine and, um, not correlated with personal virtue, in general?" Merrin is pretty sure that excessively spicy congee contributed to Wei Wuxian throwing up on her but that's really not a moral claim, what would that even mean.

"That is a fascinating topic of discussion I would like to have when you're more settled." They arrive at a tent and Sect Leader Lan instructs a servant to bring tea and a robe for Merrin. (The servant is not phenomenally good-looking. The servant is, in fact, unusually ugly for dath ilan.)

"--I assume you have different food in your different world, I'll have the servant bring small bowls of several dishes so you can learn what you like?"

...He's right, and Merrin is very relieved about it. It's an important topic to discuss but they can discuss philosophy LATER. Merrin is aware that she's not very good at this and should really schedule it for a time when she has more cognitive capacity available. 

He's so pretty though this is not the point. 

"- I'm really not fussy about food -" she shouldn't assume that the range of foods here falls within what she's used to, maybe some of it is awful, "- but yes I would appreciate that, thank you."

"I will see you in a few minutes, Mistress Dath," he says. 

She is brought a set of clothes: trousers, an underrobe (white), an overrobe (light blue with clouds embroidered on it), a sash, and a blue hair ribbon. The robes are incredibly soft and, although they don't quite fit, are just large enough that this doesn't present much trouble. 

Merrin nods and smiles and accepts the clothes. 

(...Where is she supposed to change...? She doesn't have a tent of her own yet?) 

Well, the servant has left her alone in this tent, so...

Great. Merrin is definitely capable of figuring out these clothes! 

Trousers: easy. Those are clearly for legs. They're pretty comfortable, too.

The robes are more confusing but Merrin eventually figures it out. Probably? 

...She has no idea what to do with the sash. She steps out of the tent smiling and still holding it. 

Lan Xichen returns! He is dressed in his own light-blue robes with a cloud design (significantly more elaborate embroidery) and his hair ribbon has been joined by a spiky silver hair thing. 

"Do you need help with the sash? It goes around your waist."

Merrin looks at him. Looks down at the sash. Looks up at him again. 

"....I could use some help, sure." 

Why is he so pretty. This continues to be ridiculously and absurdly distracting. Merrin used to think that the entire institution of faceblanding was probably unnecessary but she thinks she understands it better now. 

He very professionally and neatly ties it around her waist. "Where were we? --The Wen clan tends... vicious. It has been the most powerful clan for many years, and so many people in it are ambitious and power-hungry. If you don't do your best to climb to the top, someone else will push you to the ground so they can step on you." 

Merrin is mostly over being distracted by his prettiness. Mostly.

"...That doesn't sound like a very effective way to run an organization?" she says, uncertainly. "I mean, the - having everyone anticipating that either they have to be the most powerful or else they'll get...stepped on. - Metaphorically, I assume." 

"Metaphorically. --Well, who can stop it once it becomes that way? Changing a culture is hard."

Maybe at some point she will get used to his face and it will stop being distracting. Merrin thinks it is very unfair that the first clearly intelligent person she's encountered in the Bizarre Low Tech Fantasy Magic World (which she keeps hoping is a hallucination or a weird dream but she's not super expecting that at this point) is also gorgeous. 

Why would that correlate Merrin is aware that traits-generally-considered-positive tend to correlate with each other? Because of...something about mutational load, she can't remember the specifics. Possibly because she's distracted by the memory of abs– also she's still trying to hold quite a lot of medical information and that by itself would explain her distraction. 

Merrin takes a deep breath. Lets it out. "...Actually I think I could use some background on the entire conflict between the clans? Assume I'm a - small child?" aaaaah she isn't sure that's at all the association she wants to give him but never mind, "- and that I don't know anything that you'd consider obvious."

"The chief cultivator sets policy for all the clans and sects on matters important to everyone-- the education of children, border disputes, driving monsters onto other clans' territory so someone else has to kill them, that sort of thing. Clans handle their own internal matters, but the chief cultivator rules on matters affecting multiple clans. Normally, the chief cultivator is chosen by consensus of all the prominent clan and sect leaders, and he can't do anything which offends anyone too badly. Wen Ruohan wanted to be able to make whatever decisions he wanted, without having to appeal to the other major clans. So he wiped out several clans which threatened the Wen clan's power. In particular, he killed almost the entire Jiang clan-- there were only three survivors-- and attempted to kill the entire Lan clan, although fortunately more Lan could escape. Now we're going to war against the Wen clan to punish them for their actions. Does that make sense?"

Merrin was mostly following along, up to a point, but she has no idea whether that makes sense because she is too busy INTERNALLY SCREAMING! 

"......I - sorry - I'm not sure if I'm missing something but - by 'wiped out' do you mean...everyone was killed? Actually killed, murdered permanently, no way of - of getting them back -?" 

Merrin is not screaming out loud with her actual mouth but this is very, very hard and taking pretty much all of her willpower and intensively-trained discipline and inherited dath ilani Dignity. 

"Yes. Fortunately, cultivators had soul-calming ceremonies as children so they won't leave ghosts or fierce corpses."

That does not necessarily seem like an improvement, actually! If 'ghosts' and 'fierce corpses' are the best angles this bizarre fantasy world has on escaping true death– 

She can think about that LATER. 

- in the meantime it is kind of hard to think very coherently about anything else, though. 

Merrin takes another deep breath and lets it out, again. 

"I need to know what rules I should follow if I'm going to be wearing Lan robes? Apparently there are three thousand? I really cannot remember three thousand separate items but if they can be chunked into, um, less than ten sub-categories, then I can handle that. I think."

Ten is really pushing it but Merrin does not want to fail at this. She can do it if she applies extra-hard diligence, probably. 

"You are my guest, you don't have to worry about the disciplines. You aren't wearing a forehead ribbon"-- he touches his own-- "no one will mistake you for one of the Lan. Especially since you're obviously a foreigner."

"- Okay. Thank you." 

Merrin feels like she still does not at all understand the local geopolitical situation but - probably that's mostly on her? Maybe it'll be easier to figure out once she's slept, and -

- and dealt with all of her emotions about having died in a plane crash, and failed to save any of the other passengers. It's actually not at all surprising that she has feelings about that. There just hasn't been any space or time to deal with it, yet. 

Merrin is not going to say anything about this to the Lan clan leader, because it's really on her to handle this, but it's sort of showing on her face anyway, despite her best efforts. (She doesn't have a lot of practice at really hiding her thoughts and feelings. It wasn't something she was incentivized to train.) 

"You seem to have something on your mind?"

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah??? 

Yes. Yes she does. This is true. How can he tell? 

"....Um, I - died? At least I...thought I was going to. I was in a plane and it crashed. And - and now I'm here and I - I don't understand how or why or, or anything, anymore...." 

Possibly that is too much feelings and not actually what he was asking about??? Merrin feels awkward now. 

"The first time you think you're going to die is always horrible," he says. "I didn't leave seclusion for two days afterward."

"How...many times have you thought you were going to die?" 

"It's a war. I've lost count."

Merrin might notice, now that Lan Xichen's abs have been put away and are less distracting, that he's also quite young-- a little older than Wen Ning, but not very. He'd have barely graduated from school in dath ilan.

That's...confusing. He's a clan leader? Merrin isn't sure exactly what that involves but presumably there is a lot of responsibility, even separate from the entire war thing. She's noticed that a lot of things here don't fit in well with her baseline expectations for...anything, really...but some of it holds together, once she accounts for 'very low tech development' and 'magic', and this doesn't.

...Now that she's thinking about it, it's actually very notable that everyone she's interacted with is absurdly young. Much younger than her. Wei Wuxian is apparently the world's best at demonic magic and he's even younger. 

- are all the older people dead. That's not an explanation she likes but it would fit. 

"How long have you been the Lan Sect Leader?" she asks him. 

"When I was fifteen, but before the burning of the Cloud Recesses-- where the Lan live-- my uncle handled most of the day-to-day work."

Nod. "Is that - a normal age to have that amount of responsibility? What's, um, the selection and qualification process for becoming a Sect Leader?" 

Merrin also has questions about the 'burning' of the Cloud Recesses, whatever those are, but she is not going to ask right now. She's not sure that she is ready to cope with the answer. 

"No. My father died quite young. Different clans and sects have different methods of selecting a leader, but among the Lan the heir is the eldest child of the current sect leader."

"Oh. I'm sorry. That...must have been very hard for you."

This feels so, so inadequate as a response. Merrin has a wide range of scripts for a huge number of situations and yet feels not at ALL prepared for this. 

"--The books of the Lan record many strange events. If your world is unfamiliar with what happened to you, then it must be something that happened because of the way our world is."

"I would definitely like to understand what happened to me!" 

Merrin stops. Makes a face. "I...might not know, if - what happened to me - were a thing that's happened before, in my world," she says slowly. "Because, I mean, I died. From the perspective of everyone there, it's - I'm just gone, right, and there's not a mystery to explain. It's not as though I can tell anyone that actually I'm here. ...I guess the Keepers would know. Because if - this is the sort of thing that can happen - then that's a fact about the nature of reality, it's going to be correlated with everything else, reality holds together, you can still make predictions about facets of it that nobody can observe directly and report back. But that's still compatible with me not knowing that, hey, actually True Death just results in waking up in another world - I can think of lots of reasons why the Keepers might have decided that shouldn't be public knowledge..." 

"What's a Keeper?"

Merrin isn't sure what the word is translating as, for him, but it's clearly not mapping to something he recognizes.

"Ummm, they're - people who keep track of all the really important things? Especially things that are secret, and - the sort of thing that most people would have a hard time thinking about sanely. They're like scholars, I guess, and advisors. You can go to them for advice."

Wow that is not at all a clear or complete explanation of Keepers. Merrin has never actually needed to explain it to someone with no context. 

"So they're... like your world's version of the immortals?"

"....I don't actually know anything about the immortals here? Maybe. I think the most important selection criteria for Keepers is being really smart, and - good at reasoning with probabilities. And having the right personality traits for it, being - emotionally stable even when dealing with things that are upsetting to think about or just super weird." 

"It seems similar to the immortals but the immortals are less-- selected-- although if you cultivate enough that you are immortal you are likely to be emotionally stable, and of course if you live forever you have quite a lot of time to learn things."

"How hard is it, to cultivate enough to become immortal? Is it something where only a very few people have the raw talent, or is it more - something most people could do, if they put enough effort and diligence into it, but it's really hard and so actually doing it is rare?" 

"Most people could if they worked hard enough and started cultivating at a young enough age-- you can't form a golden core unless you're a child, and if you try to form it without proper techniques your core will always be weak. But the diligence required is rare, and many people have other things they would rather do."

"...Oh. So I couldn't try to learn it now, I'm too old?" 

"Unfortunately, yes."

Merrin had not previously thought of herself as someone who would want this badly to have magic powers, if having magic powers were the sort of thing people could do. It's surprising to her how disappointed she is.

"Could I learn how to see qi? ...Apparently that's important for medicine, here. I'm going to need to learn something if I want to be useful as a doctor without any of the support I'd have in dath ilan."  

"All knowledge is useful. If you come from a different school of medicine from a different world, you will have a lot to teach even if you can't sense the things our doctors can. --Non-cultivators can't sense qi directly but it is possible to figure out qi flows indirectly. For example, someone who is bleeding from the mouth is likely undergoing a qi deviation."

"Oh. Wei Wuxian was bleeding from his mouth when Wen Ning found me and brought me to see him. Is that why? It was the one symptom I didn't have an obvious explanation for." She frowns. "He's very sick. I - think he'll probably recover if he's not stupid about it but he seems - like maybe the sort of person who's going to be stupid about it, he was so upset when I said he needs days of rest, he kept insisting he was fine and could go for a run even though he couldn't sit up without help." 

"He is very stubborn and dislikes following rules, and being the most powerful cultivator in the Sunshot Campaign has not helped either of those traits."

"Yeah. I've noticed. It sounds like getting you to tell him he needs to rest isn't going to help much either? Is there anyone he does listen to?" 

"Sect Leader Jiang, sometimes. Master Wen, sometimes, if you can get Master Wen to have an opinion. Myself, if I can point him to a bunch of Wen who need to be killed. Mostly he does as he feels like."

"Okay. Um, please do not try to send him to kill anyone for - actually probably a week. If there's some kind of horrible emergency sooner than that, then...ask me, I guess?" 

"I will let everyone know that as far as Master Wei is concerned the Wen have chosen to spend the next week cleaning their swords and practicing their archery."

"Good. Thank you. I...think in general he's been taking on too much. I understand that he has a very rare skill and it's important to your war effort, but - he's still human. I don't think he has realistic expectations of himself, which doesn't help." 

"If your world has suggestions for dealing with people who are very stubborn in their pursuit of revenge, I would gladly listen, because we have very little."

"It's never come up for me before! I...can try to make the case to him that he would be able to accomplish what he wants more effectively if he paced himself better, but I'm not sure if I expect that to land." Merrin fidgets with the knot of her sash. "I should probably check on him soon. Oh, also, I need more sugar. For his treatment. I don't know if Wen Ning can get me any more, but can you?" 

"Yes, of course, we can requisition it from the Jin. It's quite scarce but the Jin are wealthy."

"I would really appreciate that. And, um, is there anyone else here in need of medical treatment? I want to - try to be useful." 

"Yes, there is, it is a war. If you don't have cultivators where you are perhaps you'd be best with the servants who get accidentally hurt--?"

Nod. "Probably. I want to learn more about cultivators and how their biology is, um, different from normal humans. I do have a lot of emergency-trauma--medicine training." Most of it simulated, but it sounds like she's about to get quite a lot of real-life experience. "I - do need some equipment, I can make do with what's available at this tech level but I'm going to need - bandages, needle and thread for sutures - I'll try to think through all the things I need." 

"I'll tell the supply train to give you whatever you need. --Oh, the food." A servant brings in a few small bowls.

"Thank you!" Hopefully the food is not terrible. Merrin isn't fussy but she isn't sure how good the cooking can possibly be at this tech level. She gamely tries it, though.

There's a noodle soup with meat and eggs and vegetables and edible flowers, a sort of rice porridge with fish and vegetables, assorted pickled vegetables, and a very spicy stir-fried chicken. 

Why does this place have food that hurts??? 

Merrin is known to be stubborn about enduring painful experiences, and once she's had time to consider it, she decide that she actually likes it? Although if this is the normal level of spiciness, she shudders to think what Wei Wuxian's congee must have tasted like. Also, it - says something about the people here, that food that hurts to eat is apparently considered totally normal and the standard thing to serve a foreign guest. Does everyone here have her weird quirk about pain? 

...Honestly, she feels like that hypothesis might explain some things about Wei Wuxian as a person. 

After she's eaten, and thanked Lan Xichen warmly again for everything he's doing to make her welcome, she asks where she should get water and firewood; she wants to start another batch of oral rehydration fluid, and she might as well start the water boiling before she checks on Wei Wuxian again in his tent. 

He asks a servant to show her where it is. 

"Please don't hesitate to ask for me whenever you need help," he says.

"Of course." 

Merrin is still unsure how to appropriately interact with the servants here. The social etiquette seems very different! She has very little idea how to be polite and it's awkward and she hates it! Probably she can't go too badly wrong by saying please and thank you a lot? 

While they're showing her around, she keeps an eye out, trying to gauge if the absurdly young ages of everyone she's officially met so far are representative of this whole camp. 

The ones in yellow robes with a red forehead dot seem to be a range of ages from their mid-teens to their early forties. The ones what she now recognizes as Lan robes tend younger: most of them seem to be in their twenties.

So Wei Wuxian is probably among the youngest people here, despite being apparently best-in-the-world level at demonic cultivation. Merrin is not really sure what to make of this. 

She starts some more water boiling, with the help of a servant who she asks to show her how one is supposed to boil water over an open campfire, and then she approaches the mouth of the tent and clears her throat. "Wen Ning? Are you in there and may I come in? I want to see how he's doing." 

Wen Ning gets out of bed. "I've been holding him, Mistress Dath. He's sleeping."

"Oh, good." She slips in, trying to move quietly. The amount of mess still on the floor does not make this challenge any easier. She lowers her voice. "I'll try not to wake him right now - though we should in an hour or two, once I've made more of the special water for him. We're going to need to bother him at regular intervals for a while, until he's properly rehydrated. ...Um, you're fine, you don't need to leave or anything. You're not in my way." 

Merrin kneels by the pile of blankets and eyes the sleeping teenage boy. How does his breathing look now compared to before? Skin color? She tries to check his pulse very gently so as not to disturb him. 

He is a little bit warmer and better at breathing, but still quite pale. His pulse is stronger. The blood has dried around his mouth.

Merrin tries to smile reassuringly at Wen Ning. "He's improving. You're doing a good job, keeping him warm. I do want to wake him up once I've made more oral rehydration solution, he's still looking pretty dehydrated and he needs the calories in it too. He's got to be really protein-deficient too, but I can't do much about it until he can cope with solid food." She looks thoughtful. "Do you think he'd go for congee that was sweetened instead of spicy? I really don't think the spicy kind can be good for his stomach right now." 

"Sweet is better than bland, but zhuren loves spice more than anything. It's the easiest way to get him to eat."

"Does he have a systematic problem with eating? That - would also explain how it got this bad, I guess. Anyway. I'll let him rest some more, I'll be back in a bit." 

Merrin takes the scale and the spoon and the little folded-paper baskets she was using, and ducks out of the tent to check on her water. Incidentally, does she actually have her own tent yet? 

Wen Ning has put up a tent for her. 

"He doesn't like eating. It distracts him from his work."

"Have you pointed out to him that collapsing because he's starving to death is also pretty distracting from his work?" Merrin says, more snappishly than she really meant to. "- Sorry. I know it's not your fault and you're doing your best for him. He's going to be all right, it just - might take longer than he would prefer. Thank you for your help with the tent. I'll be back in, um, maybe an hour?" 

She paces around by the fire until the water is boiled, and then carries it into her own tent along with the sugar and salt and scale and measuring receptacles, and gets to work mixing. 

...She appears to kind of experiencing a very belated adrenaline crash. It's the first time she's been alone in private since the plane she was in fell out of the sky, and now her hands are very shaky and she feels very cold and her stomach is churning. On reflection maybe that's the fault of the ouch food. 

She is, pointlessly, intensely annoyed at the possibility that the Keepers know this can happen and didn't warn her. It's not as though anyone would reasonably have expected it to come up. 

It takes her a bit longer than an hour, in the end, to calm down enough that she feels capable of being around people again. At which point she heads over to the adjacent tent with the container of lukewarm salt-sugar-water and, again, pauses at the entrance to check if she can come in.  

There are two adorably cuddling sleeping teenage boys.

Awwwwwwwww. They're so adorable! 

Merrin hates to wake them but she really does need to. She lets herself into the tent and sits down. "Wei Wuxian. Hey. Wake up. It's Merrin. I have more of the medicine you liked." 

Half-conscious whistle! Merrin is probably prepared for the zombie now.

Not prepared exactly but she’s expecting it, and dodges out of the way. “Hey. It’s just me. I need you to wake up more than that.” She is speaking very calmly. 

"Yanli?" he says softly.

"....No, sorry."

Who is Yanli. It sounds like they're someone he expects - or wants - to be here, when he's not feeling well. And presumably female, since he's making the guess in response to her voice. She would venture 'girlfriend' except that she has a considerable pileup of evidence that he likes boys? And he hasn't looked at her that way, not that she's necessarily that good at picking up when people are. Maybe Yanli is his sister. She hasn't seen any other women in the camp, so far, so probably Yanli isn't nearby and fetchable. 

"It's Merrin," she repeats. "The doctor. I have more of the medicine for you. It's the one you liked." 

"Oh. Okay." He tries to sit up a little bit, unsuccessfully.

Merrin watches for fifteen seconds to gauge if he seems any stronger now, and then sidles in and helps him. "Here. How are you feeling? Still dizzy?"

"I think sleeping made it worse."

"That makes sense. Or it could be the sleeping draught that Wen Ning gave you. But I think it's mostly that you're still very dehydrated and probably your blood sugar is low. Drink some of this, it'll help." 

She helps him hold it, since he seems groggy enough to be in serious danger of spilling it all over himself. Wishes vaguely that this world had invented straws. 

"It should be sweeter," Wei Wuxian reviews.

Wen Ning makes a noise and snuggles closer to Wei Wuxian.

“It’s medicine,” Merrin says, patiently and calmly and not sounding at all exasperated. “It’s mixed very precisely, if it’s too sweet then it’s actually harder for your body to absorb. How’s your stomach feeling, by the way - any nausea or cramps? …if you haven’t noticed try to take a minute and pay attention and tell me.”

"I'm FINE."

Merrin in no way whatsoever believes him! It, again, does not seem productive to start an argument about it.

She focuses for a while on coaxing him to drink more of the carefully prepared water. She's not sure to what extent this is an inherently deeply frustrating task versus Wei Wuxian being unusually frustrating. (She is not at all going to let any of her frustration show.) 

"I met Sect Leader Lan," she says after a couple of minutes, just to make conversation. "He's....very young. Oh, and I also met his brother, I think? Not sure I got his name. He looks pretty much exactly the same but was very intent on swordfighting some trees and didn't seem to want to talk to me. I wasn't sure if he doesn't like foreigners or if he just doesn't like being interrupted when he's swordfighting." 

"He doesn't like anyone in the whole world. He's the most stuck-up, smug, priggish asshole I've ever met."

Well, that's certainly a strong reaction. Merrin isn't sure how much to update off it, given how Wei Wuxian seems to have a habit of reacting strongly to quite a lot of things. (And he hasn't not been rude to her, personally, though she's trying not to hold the corpse attacks against him, it's not his fault that he wakes up disoriented when he's ill.)

"Huh. That's unfortunate. Is he rude to you too, then?" 

"He reported me to Lan Qiren when I was studying at the Cloud Recesses and snuck out late to buy alcohol. And he can't take a joke."

"Oh. Good to know, I'll make sure not to make any jokes to him." Which ought not to be hard if he won't talk to her.

Merrin frowns. "I, um - what happened to the Cloud Recesses? I'm still trying to - understand your world's recent history, and the sect leader said something about them burning..." 

"The Wen-dogs torched it and tried to kill all the Lan, even the little kids. Only a few of them survived."

(He is very very very angry. The corpses outside start to move.)

That is probably not great! He's kind of shaking; Merrin takes away the container of water before any unfortunate consequences happen to it. 

"I'm so sorry," she says. Very very calmly. "Let's talk about something else now." She should at some point LEARN to stop bringing up upsetting topics with him! 

He feels dizzy and his chest hurts and his vision keeps sort of blacking out.

"They killed my entire family and I am going to kill all of them."

That is NOT a change of topic and Merrin does not at all like how he looks. His eyes are glazed and not really focusing on her, he's breathing in rapid shallow spurts and definitely not getting enough air, and she can't see that well in the dimly-lit tent but she's pretty sure that most of the color has drained from his face. 

"That's understandable. It's an awful thing to happen. I'm so incredibly sorry." Though she's trying not to feel it, right now, because she's KIND OF BUSY and the last thing this situation needs is for her to also be sobbing uncontrollably.

"- Wei Wuxian. Look at me. I need you to take some deep breaths and try to calm down -" but she's not sure he's seeing or hearing her very clearly, right now, "- nevermind you need to be horizontal right now. I'm going to help you lie down. Just breathe." She gets him lying down in a less controlled manner than she might have hoped, she wasn't really sitting in the right position to catch him, but she at least manages to cushion his head, and then she reaches for his wrist to check his pulse. Which is unsurprisingly very fast and weak and not totally regular.

"...Please don't send a corpse after me. Wen Ning wake up please." 

"Yes, Mistress Dath, what is it"-- he sees Wei Wuxian-- "zhuren, are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I need to not be in this bed. --She said she's sorry, like it matters that she's sorry, like--"

He is not going to take deep breaths and calm down.

Well if it's not helping then she's not going to keep saying it! Merrin would really prefer that he would listen to her on the calming down thing but at the very least he's flat on his back now and if he passes out he won't fall. 

"I - asked what happened to the Cloud Recesses," she tells Wen Ning quietly. "It seemed important to understand. But he's -" Probably she should not drop a bunch of medical jargon on his head. Merrin settles for gesturing vaguely at Wei Wuxian's current state, while keeping her other hand on his wrist where she can feel his pulse. "He's very upset. And he really needs his heart rate not to be this high right now."

She raises her voice again. "Wei Wuxian, is your chest hurting? Um, that's one of the questions where it's very important to tell doctors the true answer." 

"... ... ... yes."

Oh no you really shouldn't ask zhuren about bad things the Wen have done. 

Wen Ning attempts to convey this message telepathically.

Merrin is not telepathic but she is at all capable of interpreting facial expressions and also this conclusion is becoming KIND OF OBVIOUS. 

"It's because being angry raises your heart rate, but right now you have less blood volume, because you're still really dehydrated and you're probably anemic - not enough of the substance in your blood that carries oxygen - so when your heart is trying to beat this fast it's not having time to refill properly and is actually pumping less blood, thus dropping your blood pressure even lower, and your cells aren't getting enough oxygen, which is why you're dizzy and your chest hurts. If you lie still for a while and relax it should stop hurting." 

Merrin tries to say this very calmly and neutrally, like it's an interesting scientific fact that she herself has no particular feelings about but that Wei Wuxian might want to know. Sometimes that works well with stubborn people, if they feel like they can just assess her claims as logical arguments and decide whether or not she's making sense. ...Possibly it's a thing that works better for dath ilani teenagers, but she supposes she's about to find out. 

"...well give me more of the thing that carries oxygen then."

....Cute? Merrin considers this and decides that, yes, this is a very reasonable and also endearing response. If only it were that easy.

"I would really like to! Right now I am mostly focusing on getting you to have more water in your blood - and salt, salt is important too - because that's clearly also an issue and might be the bigger issue, and I don't have any of the supplies or setup I would need to give you a blood transfusion. Or any way of checking your blood type. So unless I can figure out something using your world's magic - which apparently I'm too old to personally learn - then I think I have to do that the slow way, by making sure you're eating lots of protein and iron so your body can make more red blood cells and hemoglobin." 

She is not going to get into the complication where she can't even run proper lab tests to diagnose exactly what his balance of problems is; she's forced to rely on correlated but lossy indicators like 'how pale he looks'. This is really frustrating! She's dealt with it before in training scenarios but none of those lasted days and also they generally weren't with real patients! It's...upsetting, to know that faster and safer and just better fixes for everything wrong with him exist, theoretically, and Merrin even has most of the background she would need to rebuild that infrastructure from scratch, but it doesn't matter, she can't do that in a day. And so this is what she has, and maybe it's enough or maybe it's not - and right now Merrin is not feeling very optimistic. Mostly on the front of assuming no other horrible emergencies will happen in the next week. This world seems to just have a very high baseline of horrible emergencies.

It's like the meanest training scenario she can imagine but all the time and...not a game, the stakes are real people and real lives and it probably shouldn't hurt as much as it does, that there were children who died when whatever-it-was happened and the Lan Cloud Recesses were destroyed - burned - (a mental image of children burning to death that Merrin tries to push aside) - and she wasn't there and couldn't do anything. There's no reasonable counterfactual scenario where she could have done something, and it's stupid to feel herself wishing that her plane could have crashed five years ago - five years ago she wouldn't have been ready - she's not ready now, she's not sure it's possible for anyone to be, but if it is then it would take a Keeper and she isn't one and could never have been one and, and, and– 

"You can learn demonic cultivation."

"Oh, yes," Wen Ning says enthusiastically. "Maybe zhuren could teach her."

- wow that was a very sideways jump from what was on Merrin's mind just then. 

"I - huh. Really? Is...that useful for medicine?" It does seem probably useful for not getting set on fire the next time a horrible emergency happens in her vicinity, which Merrin is finding herself pretty concerned with, right now. "Well, how hard is it to learn and what would that involve?" 

"Well, I don't know. I've never tried to teach it before." (He does seem more relaxed with this change of topic.) "I only invented it eight months ago and I spent three of those months on a mountain eating corpses."

He spent three months on a mountain doing what. Merrin has so many questions! 

....This is probably not something she should ask him about right this second when he is just barely starting to calm down. Actually her main update here should be that it's not worth risking conversation topics that are even slightly potentially fraught when he's still fragile enough for having strong emotions to make him medically unstable again. Also, she needs to avoid more potentially upsetting topics because if she starts crying then this is not going to help anyone here stay calm. 

"How did you end up inventing it?" she asks, instead. "Was it by accident, or did you have - some reason to think it was possible?" 

"Well, resentful energy is energy, right? It only makes sense that you can control resentful energy the same way you control qi. It's just that people never learned it because it's evil or whatever."

"...But it's not the same, right? Because I can't learn to control qi, if I'm starting at the age I am now." Although Merrin does still definitely want to test that theory. "...Also what do you mean by people not learning it because it's 'evil'? Does it - cause harm? I...wouldn't've thought that it could cause harm to the corpses or - ghosts - ....um actually it's occurring to me that I don't think I really understand what you mean by ghosts and that seems like another thing that doesn't exist in my world but is really relevant here, can you explain?" 

"If people have unfinished business or are really full of hate or anger or resentment when they die then they'll stick around and try to accomplish whatever they were doing when they were alive. I am going to be one hell of a ghost."

What???????????????????????? 

- Merrin listens to the part of her that is not so much internally screaming as just internally making quiet incoherent noises of upset confusion and indignation, and acknowledges that yes this is a very reasonable response, and then tries to set it aside and rewind and go over the sentence that was just said again in her auditory memory loop.

Nope, she is not making any more progress at having a reaction more useful or coherent than what??????

(Externally she still looks calm, mostly, but if either of the boys is paying attention they will notice that her expression has gone rather fixed and she appears to be holding her breath.) 

Eventually she remembers to breathe. 

".....On further reflection," she says, tonelessly, "I - should clarify what happens to people when they die if they don't, um, have enough resentment or unfinished business to be ghosts. I don't mean to their bodies, I - um, I had been assuming the dead bodies there were just bodies, not - minds - not still sentient with the original personality... That's the part that I, I, want to know, what happens to..." 

"The soul reincarnates into a new body? Do you not know that in dath ilan."

"The what does what? ....No. We do not know that in dath ilan. I'm - not sure that's a thing in dath ilan - if it were observable in any way then someone would have noticed!" She takes a shuddering breath. "We freeze people. To - try to preserve enough of their brains, the structure, that we can bring back - the key parts that are them, someday..." 

"...no, I don't think that would work... you would still have the memories but the soul wouldn't be there-- can I have a pen?"

Merrin doesn't have a pen, and glances over sort of hopefully at Wen Ning, but she is mostly distracted by the fact that what and how and but that isn't how anything– 

"- I think maybe there's a translation problem here? You're saying - a word, I can tell it's a word of one syllable in your language, but to me it's coming across as...I don't know, 'continuous-directed-continuity-of-experience' - assuming that translates to anything to you. And that's all in the brain? It's measurably all in the brain. Obviously someone's memories aren't the only - important thing about their existence, aren't the only thing that makes up their mind-state - but we know that things like, I don't know, how much someone tends toward being patient and kind versus impulsive and angry are in the brain, because a sufficiently unlucky injury can change that - or it can make you not able to name objects, or specifically not able to recognize and name objects by touch, those are all in the brain, and we know that, and I genuinely do not see how there's any unexplained empty spot left that would be a soul. I mean, I don't totally understand how the physical structure and encoded patterns in the brain produce the phenomenology of conscious experience, but I also don't understand the math we use to build bridges that don't fall down. I am still very very sure that - actually the answer to this question is knowable, and our Civilization knows it, and the answer is that all of the traits that make a person that we - know how to name and measure or even just to care about - are represented by something in a person's brain. And so I'm very confused about what a soul could possibly be if it's something you couldn't recapture if you could actually retrieve all the information that had been in someone's brain." 

"Right, but for us it's obviously and measurably not in the brain. I can take a soul and put it in a spirit-trapping pouch and carry it around with me, and I know I have it because I can sense its presence and experience its memories with Empathy, and the fierce corpses out there have their brains all intact-- well, most of them-- but they don't have souls so they're puppets I can do as I like with."

"You can just trap the - disembodied representation of the continuous-directed-graph of an entire person, in a pouch? And then interact with it?" Merrin is staring at him with a level of incredulity appropriate to his having just proposed that two plus two equals five if you're doing a headstand at the time. 

(...it's not actually as modelbreaking as math not working the way she expects, it's - possible to imagine a set of physical laws that results in cultivator magic and souls and puppetable corpses, but Merrin is kind of running out of space in her head for bizarre startling revelations that are going to require her to refactor all of her beliefs and anticipations about the reality she is currently in. Because she can't do that right now. Possibly she isn't going to be able to do that at all, and will instead be doomed to spend the rest of her existence here in a state of constant background confusion because she no longer has all of Civilization behind her, building and studying and understanding the world and then figuring out, piece by piece, how to teach that to children. Even children like her.) 

"I assume that in the Americas or Europe or Africa or wherever you're from souls also work like that, you just don't have high enough cultivation to do it properly. I mean, have you ever woken up a frozen person to check whether they still have all of their personality."

"...We're not actually certain that that works in practice. Because we haven't checked. I just - would be really, really, very surprised if our world had physical laws where cultivation could work, or where it was possible to puppet dead bodies around, or where you could put mindstates in a pouch and sense their memories - because dath ilan is full of people who are much cleverer than I am and studying things very hard, and I'm pretty sure that has ever included meditation and martial arts and whatever the other things were because there are a lot of people - and I think someone would've noticed. At the very least someone would've noticed that there was some tiny inkling of confusion, and then a lot more people would be all over that." 

"But we know physical laws are the same everywhere in the world because people have been to everywhere in the world and they haven't found anywhere that their swords stop working."

"...I think that's by itself pretty strong evidence that I'm not from this world? I've been assuming I'm not. Mostly because - um, if 'world' is actually translating the way I've been assuming, your world is - a planet, that has continents and ocean, and when you're guessing where I could be from you're talking about different continents on the other side of oceans? And we know what's on every single landmass in dath ilan. There are...literally any groups that aren't in significant contact with the rest of Civilization, I guess, but they're tiny, and there's no way a massive conflict like this one would go unnoticed and un-intervened-in. There aren't any unmapped areas that could possibly correspond to here. When I - died, or whatever happened - I was on a plane, which apparently translates as 'very large sword' in your language or something but it's...more like an enormous metal building that can propel itself through the air, and move hundreds of people across the oceans between continents. If you've never seen planes flying overhead - they leave sort of cloud-trails in the sky - then I think that is also a pretty strong piece of evidence that we are not in fact from the same world." 

"Whoa!"

"Ningning! Paper and pen! Merrin, draw me a plane and tell me how it works."

Oh. Okay? Sure? This is what they're doing now? 

...Well, it may not seem like the top priority to Merrin, but at least Wei Wuxian is cheerful and listening to her and not getting so angry about all of the incredibly horrible events in his past, and the people (apparently, somehow) responsible for them, that it starts causing medical problems.

(And, if she's honest with herself, which seems like an important goal to aim for especially now, it's helpful for her as well to have a distraction. Something concrete to focus on, that does not involve refactoring her entire worldview. Or thinking about dead people who she wasn't there to even try to save.) 

...Merrin is okay at drawing, but the light is poor and the writing implement is unfamiliar. She does her best.

"What's an aerodynamics?"

What a good and reasonable question! Merrin...is going to have to make some significant effort to answer it, even though she has all the prerequisite background knowledge, because 'while half of her cognition is going toward tracking her patient's medical status' is not really the ideal circumstances to dig up and retrieve science lessons from a decade ago! 

"Um. In short it's the physics - the math and physical laws that cause and predict - how things move in air. Which is a fluid, like water, so it's a subset of fluid mechanics - I don't know if your world's scholars know that air can be modeled as a fluid? I think it's less obvious than it is for water, because air is much less - thick. Anyway. You can also use aerodynamics to model how birds fly - or how bees fly, which is actually pretty different - but the really short version of how planes fly is that the wings are shaped so that if there's thrust, a force pushing the plane forward - which comes from the engines, there - then the air flows around the wing shape in a way that creates lift, which is an upward force." 

....damn it she totally knew this at one point, it's not even counterintuitive, but what - 

"- I think the way it works is that the wings are shaped to be flatter on the underside and rounder on the top, which means air flows faster on the top, and that creates a pressure difference - air pressure is basically the density of air, you can imagine it like the air on the top side being stretched as it flows faster, sort of - and then that causes an upward force. .....I could probably explain it better than that with the actual math but I'd need more paper. And more time to think. It's been years since I studied this. - Um, also I'm pretty sure there are some moveable components on the wings that can change the wing-shape and thus the aerodynamics of the plane, but to be honest I probably just won't remember the details there. It's - probably the sort of thing you could re-derive with a not-too-complicated set of experiments? If you wanted to build planes here." 

Wei Wuxian is scribbling down notes into his notebook. 

"I want to build planes!!!"

"Wait, if your world knows this it knows lots of things."

"I'm very nauseous and I'm cramping."

It sounds like her world knows SO MANY things that are apparently unheard-of here, and Merrin is - suddenly looking forward to the point in the future when it will make sense for her to help them build planes. Even if it requires dredging half-forgotten math up from the cobwebby basement of her brain. 

(Probably that will be a lot easier at a point when she is not mostly occupied by her patient looking worryingly sick in front of her.) 

"....Yeah, that makes sense. I think you should lie down again and hold still and try to relax, and that will help. I can make you more of the herb mix for nausea, and I could maybe put sugar in so it'll taste better?" 

"I think that I should be treated with more facts about physics."

(Wen Ning is cracking up.)

Honestly, this aspect of Wei Wuxian's personality is much more likable! 

"...Okay, I can tell you more facts about physics but you should also lie down. Maybe you can get Wen Ning to take notes for you? ...What sorts of physics questions do you have. Um, does your world know anything about optics and how eyes work? I think I can do a pretty good job of explaining that. But I'm not going to unless you lie down and relax."