There is, in fact, a seventh-circle wizard running Detect Thoughts on Merrin now!  Along with Detect Anxieties and Detect Desires.  What do those show in terms of anxieties, desires, and also her Splendour and Wisdom?

Her Wisdom comes in at 20. Splendour is 14. 

Merrin's desires are: 

- To save her patients' lives. (Or for no one to ever die the True Death and cease to exist forever, inside Merrin's motivation system those are half-blended into a single thing.) She wants this so so so badly. 

- Right now, to see her boyfriend who she was on a plane to visit (even if it's just one more time, even a message would do, she just wants him to know that she didn't mean to fail to show up for their date and she still likes him and misses him and wants him to hurt her.) 

- To do a good job at first contact with aliens or at least not mess it up disastrously. 

Merrin's anxieties are: 

- She's afraid that the four-year-old on the plane is alone in a different other world and doesn't understand what's happening and his mother isn't there and he must be so scared but she can't do anything, can she. 

- She's worried that she's going to disappoint...someone, the 'someone' is unspecified, by not being smart enough. 

(Her int score, if he or anyone is checking, continues to show up as 16.) 

Antonio is now on relay from the (rather fascinated) wizard and has been told that Merrin has Intelligence 16, Wisdom 20, Splendour 14, and thinks of herself as too stupid for most jobs in her society.

...that would be an easier vulnerability to exploit if he wasn't trying to run it against somebody with native 20 fucking Wisdom and, he's being told, highly trained thoughts that move in not-really-human patterns.

She's apparently a Lawful Good healer type, so probably at some point they're going to discard diplomacy and break her to compliance.  But that decision does need to wait on being pretty sure that there is not the vengeance of a nearly unimaginable society following close upon her heels.

"I think that where you are from, in general, is much more important than the details of exactly what just happened to you," he says.  "- unless there's some relevance there I'm not seeing."

".....I don't know! I - guess my main thought there is that what just happened to me should not have been possible given what I know about physical reality and so maybe it's something...weird. That might have implications that you'd want to know about. But I don't know what and if you also don't know what then maybe there isn't a good avenue to make progress on it right now." 

Merrin is currently thinking that she had an entire conversation with a Keeper that time and could he not, while he was informing her that she would like it if people she was attracted to hurt her (which is apparently RARE and IN DEMAND) (Merrin would normally steer away from this thought in conversation because she's not amazing at not-saying what's on her mind and this is an infohazard) - anyway could he not have ALSO told her literally anything about what might hypothetically happen if she died in a plane crash. Because then she would maybe have made different choices about what books to read in her very limited free time. Not that there's any reason why he would have thought that was a priority so this is a pointless line of thought actually but she's still frustrated about it. 

"I'm not a specialized-professional in figuring out things that strange, and I would think it may be done at more leisure than this.  Right now I am trying to understand what, if anything, you have to offer Cheliax, which would in turn determine whether -"  The entire concept of a Grand High Priestess does not go into this language at all.  "The preeminent Chelish specialist in such mysteries would find it worth her time to speak to you."

.....Why are they asking her whether she should speak to the preeminent specialist in anything. That's terrifying ...she should ignore that and make all the right choices anyway, she's great at that, she's had so much practice. 

(Again, if this is meant to be threatening, Merrin is missing 100% of the subtext in that direction. His facial expressions are being really polite and surface-friendly and she's distracted! She is maybe feeling some vague unease but she's been feeling that way or worse the entire time!) 

".....Um, that seems like something that might also make more sense to decide slowly and not interrupt her, if she's doing other very important work?"

But maybe that's wrong maybe actually this SHOULD be the highest priority but Merrin has no idea how to advocate for anything about her being the highest priority for a Very Serious Person! 

"- Sorry, I'll try to answer your question. The world I'm from is called dath ilan. We don't have magic - we have the concept, in fiction, which is why you were able to talk about your kind of magic at all in my language– also I'm so curious how the economicmagic does language translation that seems genuinely hard - digression, sorry, anyway. I am fairly sure we have a significantly higher tech level than your world but I actually know very little about your world other than the shape of the continents, since I wasn't able to ask questions before. ....I personally am an expert in endurance emergency-response-medicine and the required training means that I also know quite a lot about biology and some amount about engineering - um, that's mostly because I did a really absurd number of Exception Handling certifications and some of those included having to build all my own medical equipment from scratch...." 

Wow she hates this. People are paying attention to her like she's important, and not even in the nice way that her boyfriends do. 

The concept of somebody with INT 16 / WIS 20 and also 14 Splendour acting and thinking like this is challenging some of Antonio's views about how reality is supposed to work, and it occurs to him to wonder whether the divination numbers mean what he believes they should.

"What sort of medical equipment can you make from scratch?"

....Something about the entire way that they're reacting to her feels - confusing, still, in a way that's leaving Merrin uneasy? But not in a way she can even slightly pin down in words or concepts or even metaphors-from-fiction. Maybe if sh'e read more fiction recently she could manage it. 

(Merrin is above-median for dath ilan at picking up on subtle body language cues, especially for anything that even slightly indicates an adversarial situation, and she is well below median at the ability to introspect on her emotions or sensory impressions and put them into words.) 

Does he want the entire rundown. That will take a while. Maybe she'll just start and try to pay a lot of attention to whether they seem bored or something? 

"So it depends a lot on the accessible resources and accessible tech level being assumed for the scenario? Starting from the most basic, I guess - if I were literally in the wilderness with only the clothes on my body, and a patient to treat - who wasn't immediately dying, I mean, if they were immediately dying then medical equipment is not my top priority - but if they weren't, I could improvise a blood pressure cuff using some cloth from my sleeve. I would need to find a sharp piece of rock to cut it or a non-sharp piece of rock of the right kind that would fracture if struck on a hard surface, or at worst a thorn from a tree - and ideally I'd have a stethoscope-equivalent, you can improvise that from the right kind of holliow reed, but if not I could just manually feel for a brachial pulse although it's less accurate..." 

Merrin has, in her lifetime, done thousands if not tens of thousands of hours of training in this area, and if nobody stops her - or looks slightly bored or antsy or disappointed or like they even at all are upset with her - it will in fact take a VERY LONG TIME. 

“What’s the most complicated technology that you can create given unbounded-time but no information-others-have-and-you-do-not?”

This continues to be amazing; the nearest terms to what he wanted to say, that actually come out from Tongues, are such precise things compared to Taldane.  To speak this language is to have it reshape what you say to others and even what you think, in an obviously deliberate way that forces you to step to the creator’s preferred rhythm for you.

She has to stop and thinking about that for a minute. He wants 'most complicated' which is different from 'most inconvenient for her personally assuming she's stuck rebuilding all the prerequisites from scratch in the wilderness for some reason' and also different from 'most time-consuming.' 

"Probably a ventilator? Um, that's a machine that breathes for people, if they're too sick or injured to breathe on their own or if they're under anesthesia for a surgical procedure. It involves some amount of basic programming - being able to give instructions to a machine so it can use information from sensors to perform tasks autonomously with some flexibility, I don't know if you have that at all here. Though the prototype that I could theoretically build uses a lot of simplifying workarounds and it's hard-coded, I don't know how to build a general-purpose reprogrammable computer from scratch although if one existed I do know how to work from there."

(Some. She is, very unsurprisingly, not good at it. Though better than anyone had expected given her raw mathematical ability.) 

"...I also know the chemical formulas for about twenty basic lifesaving drugs and a lot of the prerequisites to build a lab to synthesize them, although I have not technically done any training scenarios where I had to do that completely on my own or with no pre-existing tech to repurpose." 

The 7th-circle wizard reading Merrin's thoughts and wearing a +6 headband of vast intelligence - who's making rather more headway on tracking all this than Agramunt - informs Agramunt that this woman seems literally priceless.  He's ordered an additional three Security to this location, and for this issue to be escalated to Her Infernal Majestrix at near-top priority.

It's not obvious how Agramunt could really fuck this up for Cheliax, given that eventually they're going to torture her into compliance anyways.  But if hypothetically Agramunt decided to lose his temper and kill Merrin and she refused resurrection and Heaven realized what they had and blocked any attempted Miracles to resurrect her anyways, Agramunt's death would take a very long time and when he got to Hell he would still be sad it hadn't lasted longer.  Whatever competence Agramunt has, he should currently be attempting to show it.

All right, if there's anything in particular to be gained from interacting with Merrin cooperatively for a few days or weeks before showing Cheliax's fangs, Antonio is going to try not to screw that up, sure.  Merrin is apparently picking up on something that's making her nervous, despite all Bluff and Splendour, which figures at native WIS 20.  It's probably about time for that Suggestion.  Though first he should check, even if it runs a risk of making her slightly more suspicious -

"Your people seem prodigiously sophisticated, despite their lack of economicmagic.  Do you expect them to follow on after you to Cheliax, and if they did arrive here, would they be willing to trade with us?  Would they be willing to trade knowledge-as-a-factor-of-production to us, or only finished-goods to keep us as captive-customers?"  Add an extra question to distract from the important one: will anyone protect you, avenge you?

How is she supposed to know that ....okay fine that's an unusually pointless thought even for Merrin. She doesn't know, not in the way that she knows the chemical formula for antibiotics, and it's important to track her actual level of uncertainty, and of course a lot of relevant information - especially to the first question - is going to be hidden from her and even if it wasn't she might not be able to draw the correct inferences from it. But she doesn't have zero information and it's an important question. 

(She's not suspicious that he's asking, though she's a tiny bit confused, it seems to be - holding some level of implicit assumption that dath ilan wouldn't default to cooperation? That...tells her something about this world, maybe about this world's fiction about two civilizations coming into contact, and maybe also about - she struggles a little to frame the thought - about how their Governance thinks of themselves? That's not quite right but she makes a mental note of it for later processing.) 

"...Um, I think I have relatively less of the context I would need to make a good guess about the first thing, I would - lean slightly against, because even if it's just something known by Keepers that this happens, if it were possible to go find where the people ended up, I think I would probably have noticed some sign of it? But it's not impossible that there's a really good reason to conceal any sign of it, and I...would be reluctant to state confidently that a group of determined Keepers working together couldn't do that. If I had to put numbers on it now I'd probably say...one in ten chance or less? But plausibly I shouldn't be trying to put numbers on it until I've thought about it for at least an entire day." 

She wonders if it's actually more feasible that she - or one of their economicmagic wizards, at least - could contact dath ilan from here? Which seems like it would be obviously a good idea, if they could figure it out, given the INCREDIBLY HUGE potential for trade here. (Also it would be great to be less completely on her own, but that's a her-affecting-only consideration, it clearly won't be an important part of the case she could make to Governance here that it's worth investing massive resources in a research project on this.) ....This line of thought is not answering the question she was asked and she'll mentally table it for a minute. 

"On the trade question, I - think they'd have a lot of questions? Some of them are questions I would be able to think of myself once I've seen more of how your economy works, probably there would also be a number of questions that I am never going to think of on my own. There might be concerns about going slowly to avoid unknown-unknown destabilizing effects?" There might be concerns about something related to infohazards but for the very obvious reason she's not going to guess what they would be. Even fiction covering actual infohazard concerns would then just not be available to the public to read, and Merrin hasn't read almost any of the 'trading with alien civilizations' genre of fiction anyway because it tends to have WAY more math than she feels like poring over in her leisure time.

"...Um, I think it seems more likely than not that Governance would settle on trading with Cheliax? But I'd be leery of confidently saying that likelihood is higher than, ummmmm, six or seven out of ten - it probably is but I'm doing a lot of guesswork? Assuming yes on trade at all, I think it's pretty likely they would be willing to trade knowledge-as-a-factor-of-production, although for - more in exchange, I think, it seems legitimately more valuable. But ultimately I think dath ilan would benefit from trade, and your world would obviously benefit - you seem a lot more resource-poor, at a glance, despite the magic - and that in itself is something our Governance would care about." 

If Merrin were a completely different person she would probably already have been thinking about how much she could fairly get paid for sharing her own knowledge, inconveniently limited as it is. She should probably be thinking about it anyway; the shoulder-voices of several of her boyfriends are protesting the fact that she hasn't yet. 

"Does that help answer your question?" 

"It does.  Thank you, that seems more than enough to confirm that you are a resource-priority for now."

One in ten is uncomfortably larger than 'no', and if Merrin was lying, Antonio would have been notified so.  But he's also being notified that her thoughts are starting to trend in worrying directions already; so, yes, it may be time for that Suggestion now.  If it's just a Suggestion, dath ilan will probably not be too offended if they find her... or not very much more vastly offended than a Lawful Good realm would be in any case by Cheliax.

At Agramunt's silent signal, a harmless-looking young man, wearing a lesser version of Agramunt's uniform, enters bearing a platter of plain fruit, which he sets down on the table before Merrin.

"I know enough now to set your proper accommodations in motion, and will leave you some moments of peace," says Agramunt.  He rises, and bows.

The disguised seventh-circle wizard likewise bows.  "I hope these small tokens of hospitality find your favor, and that you are pleased with your reception here and your concerns set at ease."

"Thank you. I appreciate it. ...If it's not too much trouble, could I have some kind of writing material in here as well? I want to take some time to put my questions in better order and figure out what things I should be telling you about as a top priority," in a way that's less disorganized than what she's being doing so far, and also she should figure out what to ask them to pay her, because 'that conversation feels awkward to have' is in no way whatsoever a good reason to keep avoiding it. And it'll be less awkward if she can present it in a concise and dignified way. 

(The fruit is almost certainly not Secretly Drugs? Merrin suspects that she is vastly over-worried about the possibility of random foods or beverages being drugs, relative to all the thousands of other possibilities for unwanted surprises one might expect to run into when suddenly alone in an entire different Civilization which is also a fantasy setting, and it would be more useful to take the attention that's currently going into worrying about that one and instead staying alert for other cultural-difference pitfalls.) 

...The Suggestion does not do anything. It doesn't look like Merrin threw the spell off - she didn't notice anything at all - it just.....didn't have any effect. 

Antonio is notified of this and does not, of course visibly panic in any outward way, although there's a definite spike of inner horror.

"Of course," he says graciously.  "Someone will knock with it shortly."

He departs.

- and throws up a wall of silence the moment they're outside, whirling on the seventh-circle.  "What the Abyss?  Her thoughts show her as a complete commoner from a nonmagical world, right - does she not have a soul for spells to affect -"

"You're talking gibberish.  Those spells work on brains, not souls, if they worked on souls they'd persist into the afterlife.  Shut up while I check a few things."

The seventh-circle casts.  Casts again.  Casts again.

"No magic reaches her, any part of her body, it all vanishes as soon as it would have touched her skin.  How the fuck did you Teleport her here?  Did she do anything before that, switch off a device she had -"

"I wasn't there, but Vicent didn't mention that in his report -"

"I'm ordering a second-circle cleric to come in bringing that writing material, we need to try a Lesser Restoration on her, see if nonaggressive magic gets through -"

"Can we delay on that?  We don't want to needlessly waste the time of the Church while matters are still so unsettled."  What the Abyss are you saying?  We need this to be firmly a Crown project before the Church hears about it!

"She's a masochist with Wisdom 20 who specialized in enduring difficult situations, you fool, if we can't heal her during torture it's possible we can't successfully torture her into compliance without sending her to Heaven."

Theoretically, Antonio is still in charge here.  Theoretically.  Even if he is 4th-circle and the other is 7th-circle, he is the senior Crown diplomat who is handling this issue and the other is not.

"That's certainly a terrifying possibility," he says mildly.  "It means that if either of us screwed up, we can expect a very long death, that we'll still be sorry to see end.  I'm countermanding your order for a cleric to bring Merrin the paper; we don't need to know right away whether we can heal her without her permission, until we have an excuse to learn that more naturally.  I'll just play the diplomatic game as if it was sudden-death, with her, until I do know."

Merrin, oblivious to these happenings, sips the water and cautiously nibbles on some fruit and waits for her writing materials. 

It takes a couple of minutes before a new person - who does not seem to have the magic to speak her language - brings paper (of reasonable quality, not to dath ilan manufacturing standards obviously but it's a whole lot better than the paper she would know how to make herself) and low-tech-but-fancy pens that only take a little bit of experimentation to figure out how to use. (Merrin's main inference from the delay is that paper wasn't literally in the next room, which makes it a slightly more inconvenient request than she meant to make, but oh well.) 

She arranges herself comfortably in front of the nearest writing surface, and then....doesn't write anything at all for several minutes, while she wrestles her brain into setting aside most of the eight thoughts it's trying to have all at once, and instead think about them ONE AT A TIME. 

...The overarching question here is 'what is she going to do.' Because she has to do something, and for the first time in her entire life, she can't assume that anyone else is going to tell her what or handhold her through all the considerations or give her good advice. (She's not certain of that - once she knows some more people here, and once they know anything about her to tailor advice to, maybe that will be an option? But flailing for it right now before she's even tried to orient herself is, while slightly tempting, not actually a good plan.) 

In some ways she's very prepared for this? She's used to weird. She's spent most of her life intensively training herself to be able to handle weird. This is still...several orders of magnitude more completely unexpected and bizarre than any Exception Handling scenario she's ever done, but she has the mental building blocks to cope with it, and so she will.