Merrin is having an impressively bad day. 

Actually her day was FINE up until about ten minutes ago, and then very very rapidly became not fine at all, and things did not improve from there and, in fact, continued to deteriorate right up until the moment of the crashing plane's impact. At which point Merrin expected the badness of her day to become a moot point, because she would not be having a day anymore, or ever again. She had a lot of feelings about this, briefly, and also expected the crash to make all of that moot. 

Her day has instead suddenly veered from disastrous into bizarre and confusing, because she is definitely continuing to have experiences. Also her continuing experience no longer includes being on a plane, crashing or not. She's in a....classroom? Sitting on the floor. Surrounded by students, all of whom are much younger than her and aren't yet reacting visibly with the same degree of shock she feels but are probably about to. 

Merrin is pretty sure that this is not how True Death is supposed to work. This appears to be happening to her anyway, though. Maybe this is actually completely normal and there's an obvious explanation. Somehow. Hopefully, either her brain will soon regain the capacity for having hypotheses about things, or someone is about to tell her what in the name of superheated toilet paper is going on. Merrin hates being confused. 

(She will grudgingly allow that she hates being confused much less than she hates being dead.) 

Continuing to sit on the floor and stare blankly at her surroundings is unproductive and might also be rude, but Merrin has, again, been having a really spectacularly bad day, and she isn't quite feeling up to saying words yet. 

From the students' perspective, a young woman in her mid-twenties, with her hair cut short and wearing a completely unfamiliar style of clothes that look well-made and expensive at a glance, has suddenly appeared out of thin air. She's sitting on the floor and she looks, by Chelish standards of emotional expression, VERY VERY UPSET. 

"Who are you and what are you doing here?" the lecturer demands sharply in Taldane.

He's wearing normal academic wizard-wear for Cheliax, so an obviously magical set of robes in mostly black with gold detailing, tied off with a sash loosely enough to expose a V into his upper chest, which is relatively buff for a wizard.  And a headband that's visibly one of the nicer ones, with enough silver and sapphire-dust detailing to show that this headband wasn't purchased by somebody at the bare limit of what they could afford.  And one magical ring on either hand, and a necklace that glows blue enough to be visible in the classroom's indoor Continual Lighting.

Apparently she has landed on a pile of fantasy tropes? This appears to be the thing happening now? 

It's not making the situation any less weird! As a thing to be happening, it's - less weird in some sense than the fact that she's around to experience anything at all. In isolation, finding herself in a room with someone who is clearly trying very hard to look like a powerful magic user and addressing her in a language she doesn't understand or recognize might, possibly, have some kind of sensible explanation. Though the only specific one occurring to her now is 'someone thought it would be an entertaining prank', and Merrin can't see any way to fit that together with the plane-crash part. 

...Also the fantasy character talking to her looks kind of angry about it? You would THINK that having just DIED IN REAL LIFE and then ended up here would be big enough to push aside petty feelings like 'social anxiety' but apparently not. 

Merrin takes a deep breath. "I'm sorry, I don't understand you. If, um, you understand me," which is in hindsight a silly thing to bother saying out loud, if he doesn't then he won't understand that comment either, "can you please tell me where we are right now and what you observed happen just now?" 

He's got permanent Comprehend Languages but not permanent Tongues.  The language isn't one he's ever heard before, he doesn't think.

"Cheliax," he says, and reads her reaction to that, since she's not looking very composed.  Alarm?  Horror?

Mostly she looks blank, showing no sign of recognition. She is still visibly shaken, but confusion is rising to the forefront now. 

"...I'm guessing you mean that's where we are?" He's reacting as though he understood her, but he doesn't seem inclined to give her thorough or helpful answers. Or maybe he understands Baseline but can't really speak it? No, that doesn't make sense... "Um, is it a - city? Continent? ...Planet?" The name of a fantasy setting she's not saying that out loud. 

...uh huh.

Let's try a Silent Image of Golarion as a huge globe, slowly rotating so their visitor can see it.*  He makes a few gestures to cast the simple illusion, then raises his eyebrows at her, invitingly, and gestures at the planet, if she'd care to point out where she's from.

(*)  Having ninth-circle wizards around means that somebody has ever seen your planet from space and drawn accurate maps of the continents accordingly.

Merrin jumps visibly when the Silent Image appears. She's not normally this easily startled but the whole DYING experience has left her unusually jumpy. 

...and also apparently on another planet???? That is not how plane crashes work!!!! It takes her a minute of examination to be sure, but nope, she is pretty sure that those are not the continents she knows. 

In some sense it's not surprising that this is a different planet, because she also just observed something that shouldn't be physically possible. (She can remotely imagine that in theory maybe you could do it with advanced technology but the entire vibe of this room is screaming that this is not that kind of setting. Merrin is not sure right now if that's a valid form of reasoning, because her brain keeps trying to chase down five different lines of confusion in parallel and she cannot actually do this and so it's hard to think.) 

She is now simultaneously thinking that:

- This makes no sense and maybe she's dreaming - but it doesn't feel like a dream or have the usual tells, other than the physically impossible occurrences, and Merrin is decently competent at lucid dreaming if she can reach the point of noticing she should check. 

- Maybe she's hallucinating? ...This feels too coherent to be a plausible hallucination. And it feels like the rest of her thinking is too intact. Though of course if she were just out of contact with reality she would probably be missing the metacognition to run that check usefully. 

- Also she is worried that she's in trouble for unexpectedly invading their magical academy and that people will be UPSET and there will be a CONFLICT. You would think that being unsure whether any of this is real would make that aspect less nerve-wracking but somehow it's actually more stressful than the rest. 

"...I think I'm in fact not from the same planet," she says finally. "I'm sorry, this seems like it might be a private area, I didn't mean to end up here. I don't know how I got here either. It might help if you can tell me what you saw happen. And, um, whether this is a - thing that just happens sometimes here?" 

He taps his lips, to indicate that he can't speak her language.

He didn't miss the jump or shock when she saw the Silent Image, either.  It sure looks like somebody who, despite her obvious wealth, has never seen a Silent Image cast before.

"Asmodeus?" he tries, and draws a pentagram in the air.  His Lord is the greatest of gods, and extends across all the realms known to Pharasma Herself; His Name may be recognizable where 'Cheliax' is not.

Nope. No recognition. She does look a lot calmer now, and is frowning at him in a puzzled way. 

"I can, um, go, if this is a bad time for me to be here?" Not that she has any idea where she could go, yet. 

All right, he's at the limits of his ability to extract more information by nonmagical means.  He turns deliberately away from her, to the utterly silent class.  "You get a chance to impress me," he tells his students.  "That's by having Detect Thoughts hung and successfully casting it on our visitor, who overtly presents as unknowing of Taldane, Cheliax, Golarion, Asmodeus, and possibly the existence of illusion spells in the class of Silent Image.  If you succeed, report any interesting discoveries to me by Message."

Ione is usually very, very cautious about who she impresses and how publicly.  Academic high achievers who don't otherwise have powerful means to defend themselves are prime targets for having tutoring and homework assistance extracted from them.  They're usually willing to go to greater lengths to threaten you than you want to go to defend yourself.

She finds herself strangely unable to resist the prospect of impressing this time, though, and strangely glad that she hung Detect Thoughts today (one of the most useful spells you can possibly have in this environment).

She casts, her hands underneath her desk, because there's no point in being more public than necessary.

It's a useful spell to have if you're going more on the offensive, too.  Asmodia is good enough at academics that she doesn't need to extract tutoring from anybody else, ever, but something about playing the game purely defensively just rubs her the wrong way.

She enjoys looking at other people's thoughts.  It gives her a better sense of them as people, at least if they fail their Will save.  And if she ever does finally decide to crush her school year beneath her heel for the fun of it, she'll have an easier time of it with the added preparation.

Great, he stopped looking at her, now is the perfect moment to say "tsi-imbi" clearly and calmly and with as much confidence as she can manage, which isn't a lot right now, and while self-consciously looking at the floor rather than making eye contact with any of the fantasy magic academy students watching her. 

Nothing happens. The first thought that any of them pick up is Merrin noticing that nothing happened. And that she's oddly unsurprised about this. Although, given how her day is going, it's impossible to tell if the lack of surprise is because it was actually objectively unlikely, or just because she was surprised by so many things in a row that her brain is hitting the emotional equivalent of semantic satiation.

She's a little relieved, because having a full-on psychotic break on a plane, which seems like the most likely timing for it since that's when her day stopped being normal, is - well, it's apparently in conflict with her self-image that this is the kind of thing that would happen to her. Everyone would be very kind about it, obviously, but they would probably ask her to work shorter shifts she realizes that is not important. Also she should not actually update on that all the way yet. Maybe the first responders are being slow. 

She automatically goes for the mental motion of 'replacing intuitive reason with logic', ignoring the momentary flinch of expecting this to be hard and hurt and also not work very well. (The flinch is a lot quieter now than it was at some points of her schooling. Reality is less deliberate about pushing her to her cognitive limits.)

So, compared to the hypothetical where her plane flight went on as normal and she landed and had her DATE (...now is not the time to be sad about missing that), it's unlikely? Merrin knows a lot more than most people about the risk factors and also the usual experience of losing touch with reality, and this feels very atypical. Her prior on having a psychotic break while well-rested and not especially stressed and without any warning signs at all beforehand is...low. One in a thousand? As an upper bound, it's probably lower than that but she doesn't trust her ability to backfill what she would have said before this happened. It did happen. And of course she's not comparing that to the hypothetical Perfectly Normal Day, the alternative here is that actually the plane did crash and she did die and now instead of being dead she's on another planet. ...how is she even supposed to put numbers on this? Right now there are no numbers, there is only flailing.

(Ten seconds where most of her thoughts are busy assigning probability estimates to various pieces of this ANYWAY and holding them up to herself and doing the mental equivalent of scowling dubiously at them.) 

- aaah nope this is not working. Fall back on things which are not math. This seems physically impossible given what she knows. But Merrin is accustomed to the fact that there are many, many things she doesn't know, and wouldn't be able to make sense of even if someone tried to explain them to her. Maybe...the reason history is screened off at all is to conceal that magic exists? And there's a secret conspiracy of magic users, and one of the things they do is...magically grab people right before they would otherwise die irretrievably? Doesn't explain the continents being different, though. Magic conspiracy also has space travel?

Merrin is pretty sure that she's now starting to wildly posit things that would be huge and have correspondingly vast implications and that seems - not right. Though what she's observing with her own eyes already has vast implications. But all her wild guesses are going to be too specific and also, right now, extremely uninformed, because fantasy magic teacher guy is either unable or unwilling to answer her questions about what just happened. 

She wants a SMARTER PERSON to figure it out and tell her. Or even better, access to PREDICTION MARKETS, that'd be great. Although right now she's not even quite at the point where she could frame it as a clearly resolvable question. Why is she so bad at things  What would people think of that, it would be hilarious .....this is an unusual amount of flailing instead of thinking even for her, oh right, she's still having an adrenaline comedown, that's very unsurprising and not something she's going to hold against herself but it's so inconvenient. 

The woman has an unenhanced INT of 16. She seems to consider this clearly insufficient. A lot of her thoughts do give the impression of being...slightly too large and complicated for her to comfortably track, a little as though she were used to wearing a +2 headband and her mental habits keep reaching for more scaffolding that isn't quite there. 

Ione reports.  Her name is Merrin, her thinking processes are unlike anything Ione has ever seen, intensely self-reflective like she's high on triple-strength Owl's Wisdom but not in the useless way you'd expect, constantly thinking about how to control her own thoughts.  She's from a world utterly unlike anything Golarion has ever heard of, one with no knowledge of magic but they also hid all their history (and didn't bother faking anything to replace it? just left a big visible gap? weird) so maybe the magic is there but hidden, but their society is still powerful enough that people flew through the air and into space apparently without magic or anything that she knows to be magic anyways...

Asmodia reports.  Merrin's thoughts are incredibly sophisticated and trained, moving in polished unfamiliar patterns whose usefulness is only apparent after they finish executing, somebody with incredibly high Intelligence worked hard on crafting this woman into whatever she actually is now.  Many of her thoughts refer to what Asmodia can only dimly feel as sophisticated mathematical concepts that she can't read because they just have no conceptual equivalents that Asmodia knows about.  She's using numbers to guide her own thought processes in a way that Asmodia can't understand, having something to do with - probabilities?  Asmodia is pretty sure that this woman is for some reason much much much more mathematically knowledgeable than Asmodia herself despite not being any kind of wizard.

Pilar reports.  Merrin has no idea where she is or what's going on, is questioning her sanity but double-checking it in some very well-informed and medically trained pattern, concluding that she's not in fact insane.  She was in an air-traveling machine going across continents heading for a date? she is apparently wealthy enough to just do that? but instead something happened that meant she should die and instead of being dead she is here?  She's in the middle of coming down off an adrenaline crash.  Also her thoughts seem very clean and organized.  Pilar would like to follow along with whatever's happening with this person so she can learn to have clean organized thoughts like that, if that otherwise serves Asmodeus.

Does she look like she knows anything useful, you fools?  Knowledge such as is not yet in Golarion?

Return messages:  """Yes."""

Vicent has been making deliberate moves, here, in case that was not clear.

Vicent did not have Detect Thoughts hung today - or rather he had two, but he's used both - nor has he Tongues, why would he.

Why not call over somebody with both of those spells, then?  Because then they would have charge of this visitor, this Merrin, and he would not.

Why have three Chelish wizard students look at her thoughts?  Because now three of Ostenso's best students have been exposed to this matter, which shall obviously become secret, and they are not so valuable that anyone would object to that; but neither are they so disposable that they would be disposed-of, rather than being told to follow along.  And the three know him and are in his charge as a teacher, and will make it that tiny bit more awkward for him to be brushed aside and brushed away when this matter is referred upward.

"Sala, Pineda, Asmodia, with me.  Manel, run as quickly as you can to the headmaster's office and inform him that we have five for an urgent trip to diplomatic reception in the palace at Egorian."  Some diplomat there will have permanent Tongues, and of course also Detect Thoughts and Suggestion and other standard diplomatic spells, and adequate Bluff and Splendour to handle her; nor should there be wizards there so mighty as to disdain Vicent for his 5th-circleness.

...oh.  She was not expecting that.  Why was she not expecting that?  She has been stupid.

This is not a good thing.

This could potentially be a very good thing, although it probably isn't.  At all.

Fucking AWESOME.

He turns to Merrin, though of course he doesn't call her that, as she hasn't yet spoken her name.  "Vicent," he says, tapping himself.  "Of Cheliax."  He points to Ione, now approaching.  "Ione Sala, of Cheliax."  He points to Merrin.

Merrin has been paying quite a lot of attention to the fantasy-setting magic teacher and his fantasy-setting magic students.

She thinks she recognizes the kind of body language people have when they're providing status reports and then receiving further instructions?

(This is an important thing to be able to recognize, in Merrin's profession, since verbal questioning takes time and disrupts focus. And it's one of the few areas where she's not natively below median in terms of natural ability; she's not brilliant at body-language-reading, or anything, but she's fine at it. And she learns fast and can compensate for her weaknesses. She had to, to make it as far as she has.) 

Some of the reactions she thought she was noticing didn't, apparently, coincide with anyone talking? That's confusing. Although she's also still confused about how and why the magic instructor can, it seems at a first glance, understand what she's saying but not answer. One explanation is that he has good reasons not to (for example, if everything he might say is an infohazard.) Another explanation, though, is that there's....something magic going on? 

....She will try to think about what rules-of-magic she can infer so far in a moment. (And she's noting for future consideration that they're reacting quickly and smoothly to her arrival, despite the fact that they were clearly almost as confused as her in the early moments. But really all that tells her is that they're competent and comfortable enough with one another to do seamless teamwork.) Right now she needs to answer his question.

"Merrin," she says, pointing at herself.

And then makes a wild guess that the second part, which was in common between the instructor and the student he picked out from the group. "Dath ilan," she offers. 

She looks over at the younger student who was just singled out, and smiles at her. It's a tired, relieved sort of smile. 

(Merrin has been briefly considering other ways of expressing her emotional attitude, in hopes of building some kind of rapport, but concluded that they will probably not recognize dath ilani conventions for the sort of salute shared between professionals, or the slightly different salute that a teacher would give a student, or that a professional in one area of expertise would give another professional– ...she is just going to stop overthinking this now.)