- actually, following that line of thought a bit further, she's thought of a new question, which is: was she directed here? Was the process that sent her to Cheliax a random one, or - was it something that was optimizing toward some kind of goal? That...would have implications. Though without knowing any of the things that Keepers might or might hypothetically know or have guesses about for why this is a thing, she can't really do better than guessing– 

- probably actually false? A world that was picked out from vast numbers of them for her specifically is going to have different properties and without knowing what goal the hypothetical goal-oriented process is acting toward, she's still going to be filling in with some guesswork - and she should NOT be immediately latching onto the first immediate thought that she's here to FIX MEDICINE. She can notice the urge to, the sense that it would relax some kind of internal tension, that it would feel like having solid ground under her feet again, but she doesn't have to succumb to it. 

She writes that down, though. (In an Exception Handling cipher that she learned, both because this seems especially infohazardous and she doesn't know if the locals have magic to read text in other languages as well as understand spoken words but it seems plausible, and also because it lets her use some shorthand, though inconveniently the shorthand it affords isn't really optimizing for writing out notes about True Death sending people to other worlds.) 

All right. Good. She can spend a minute or two thinking of other possible reasons she could have been sent here, and then she can think about what she would expect to look different in those worlds versus an unselected one.

....The second thought she has is 'what if she's here to meet someone and have a Romance.' Great, thank you, Merrin's brain, she's writing that one down but it seems a lot less likely.

She could be here to learn their economicmagic, research how to re-contact dath ilan, and bring her new knowledge back to Civilization? That sounds terrifying but it's going on the list. 

She then immediately scrabbles for a fresh sheet of paper to start a new category, which is 'questions to ask her gracious hosts'. The economicmagic can obviously be taught, given that she landed in a school for it, but it seems important to know how long it would take and whether it requires any innate aptitudes and also she needs to find a way of testing whether the apparent-humans here have some innate differences that lets them learn it, and she wouldn't be able to. 

She could...be here to trade her knowledge to them and become fabulously wealthy? That feels unsatisfying, though. Or maybe just disappointing. Not the thing Merrin pictures herself being best placed to do. Also probably at least half of the other people who died in the plane crash would have had a lot more fun with it. (Though there's no particular reason to expect the mysterious guiding force, if it exists, to be selecting for her personal happiness?) ...Okay on reflection she is not going to try to rank her wild guesses by likelihood yet, she's just going to get them down on paper at all. And timebox this part for another two minutes and then move on, since presumably her hosts are going to want to speak to her again before next week. 

Great. She has some possible stories - they're nowhere near fleshed out or rigorously defined to call 'explanations' yet - for why she in particular is here in particular. That's probably enough to go on for now; it'll at least give her directions to focus her attention, rather than 'being constantly on alert for anything at all' which is not actually a great way for orienting to a complex new environment.

(There are downsides, of course, maybe she's making some basic reasoning error and now she'll be paying attention to the wrong signifiers, but she's not sure if she's capable of coping with her previous level of utter confusion for too much longer. She makes a note to reassess at some point– 'at some point' isn't a time, she will make a note to reassess tomorrow morning and then again in a week? And maybe revise that if something completely model-breaking happens.) 

Right. So. Implications for the near term. ...For a lot of the possible scenarios, it makes sense for her to be trying hard and early to provide value? Also that makes sense for common-sense normal reasons. She can start making a list of domains-of-knowledge that she would, if they turned out to be something Cheliax considered valuable, be things she could explain or demonstrate at all. Please don't let it be math Merrin is an adult who is extensively trained in dealing with very stressful things and teaching math to people who are probably WAY SMARTER than her but lack the benefits of dath ilani education is something she can totally do if necessary. 

- actually, pause there, she feels like she might have skipped a step. Definitely skipped a step. Possibly the most key part of providing value here is going to be 'not accidentally making anything worse' and unlike in the past, she can't rely on other people catching her obvious oversights or reasoning errors or even things like misremembering part of how engineering-models of something like bridge structural integrity and stresses work. (If she has to explain that she will absolutely not get it right on the first try, so it's a real concern.) 

She obviously doesn't want to cleverly and generously explain how to build better bridges and then have one of them collapse, because people would DIE and also it would be embarrassing but

- wait put that entire line of thought on hold, because HOW did Merrin manage to only think of this NOW especially given what just happened to her it should really have been way more salient and she didn't even think to mention it when she was literally explaining medical technology. 

She writes DEATH on the top of a third clean sheet of paper, and then stops and considers whether actually she should drop what she's doing and go find out RIGHT NOW if their economicmagic has an alternate solution to True Death or if her first priority has to be getting cryonics access set up for the entire planet literally as fast as possible. 

Yeah okay it might be worth it to collect her thoughts a bit more than this, except that Merrin is pretty sure that she's going to be incredibly distracted about this until she knows one way or the other. 

She gets up, folds and stuffs her written-on papers plus an extra blank one into a pocket in case she ends up not in this room again for a while, and then marches to the door and sticks her head out into the hall to see if anyone is visible whose attention she can get. 

Antonio is there chatting politely in Taldane with a Security (who is still, again, the 7th-circle).  He doesn't look at all like he's bored or wants Merrin to be done any sooner!

(...they do what instead of afterlives.  What.)

"I'm sorry to interrupt and this might not take long but I just thought of a question that I should really have asked in the first five seconds," Merrin says, somewhat woodenly, and looking, by the standards of Cheliax, very visibly shaken and possibly even more upset then when she arrived. "Does your economicmagic have a - solution to people's continuous-directed-continuity-of-experience ceasing to exist when their body dies of biological causes? ......Now that I'm saying it out loud, for all I know your people would also mysteriously find themselves in other worlds, but that's still kind of not great from a lot of angles and I sufficiently don't have a handle on the entire phenomenon that I would really not want to bet money on it much less people's continued existence. In my world we have a solution for it that very likely works but it really doesn't look like your tech or resources would be up to it yet."

(Merrin would fix that. If it's necessary to fix then it's now her highest priority, period, and she wouldn't do it for free but she would definitely consider, like, letting their Governance sign a contract to pay back the value of the information she's selling to them afterward, since she's worried it might already strain the planet's material resources to attempt the project at all.) 

Chelish diplomats, unlike virtually anybody else in Cheliax, have training in how to not lie unless there's an actual reason for it.  Is there a reason for it here?  He needs a snap decision and Antonio's snap decision is that they don't want her obsessing about a problem that doesn't exist at the expense of all the other technology she might helpfully try to teach them.  If they want Merrin altruistically motivated to sign rushed agreements, later, Cheliax can exhibit or produce any number of people in conditions she will find terribly distressing.

"When people die, their 'soul', which - I think contains their directed-continuity-of-experience though I'm not sure I quite understand the word, it maps onto 'soul' if it maps onto anything in my language - goes to one of the nine major places-people-go-when-they-are-dead, possibly to the realm of some particular 'god' if they -"  No word for 'worshipped', no remotely neighboring concept.  "- were associated with that 'god' during their lifetimes."

When people die they go WHERE and also WHAT and WHY. Merrin is sagging a bit in sheer relief but she also has so many more questions than she did before! 

"That's...good, probably?" she says uncertainly. Well, it seems like it would be hard for it to be worse than the alternative, even if it's much worse than it sounds on the surface, somehow - she definitely needs to find out what these places-people-go-when-they-are-dead are like and whether people are conscious and experiencing at a normal subjective speed compared to the planet (if that's even a coherent question) - can they communicate with living humans - why are there nine and can they communicate with each other or is it in practice more similar to 'people are thrown at random into other worlds' where they'll never see their family or friends again - 

That's too many questions. She can't express that many questions all at once even in Baseline. 

"- Why are there nine, and do different places have different properties? ....Also it's seeming increasingly important that I get a full or at least a partial explanation of what 'gods' are and how they factor into this system." 

Chelish diplomats also have training in keeping their lies simple.  Antonio briefly considers how much else they might need to hide, to hide that alignment is a basic axis of the universe; he discards that option.  He briefly considers trying to persuade Merrin that Evil is really quite nice; discards that option too.

"Gods are ideal-agents... I think that's probably a mistranslation since I have no idea what that is?  Gods have vastly more thinkoomph than mortals, with three or four times the thinkoomph-score of an average mortal...  Merrin, I apologize, but this language simply does not want to translate correctly anything I am trying to say into it."

"The nine realms are separated by alignment; an axis of orderliness versus entropy, and an axis of acting for the good of society rather than acting for the benefit of oneself.  Neutrality is a third position on both of these two axes; thus, nine realms.  Asmodeus is the god that Cheliax aligns itself with, an orderly god who acts for the good of society.  His realm is termed 'Heaven'."

Oh wait he didn't say three or four SDs like she'd misheard at first, he said three or four times, one: Merrin has questions about their scale, and two, superheated toilet water that's terrifying. Apparently this world contains...a kind of being that aren't not something it would make sense to describe as ideal-agents, and also are clearly going to be able to out-optimize all the humans, and ALSO probably there's one of them that is acting with the goal of maximizing entropy and acting for one's own benefit at the expense of Civilization???? She should probably....ask...but she's pretty sure that she's going to hate the answer and also why does this world keep springing weird horrifying problems on her with no warning. 

"....I have a lot of questions," Merrin's brain is currently sort of trying to explode into a rapidly growing fractal of additional questions, "but I'm starting to wonder if your economicmagic can do something like the translation effect you're using, but on me and for reading text? Because I suspect it'd be a lot faster if I could just read a book."

"I'm not sure we can.  This translation effect is having difficulties of a kind that suggest - may I try a small experiment?  I'd like to see whether there's something anti-economicmagical about you."

"....Sure, although I would appreciate a quick explanation of what the experiment is first, if it's going to involve doing magic to me. Is it a known thing that people can be anti-magical and that causes issues for translation magic, or are you just inferring based on the fact that Baseline doesn't have certain words and doesn't easily let you talk about relevant concepts and thus maybe my world is inherently anti-magical?" 

Either way what does it meaaaaaaaaan if she turns out to have something anti-magical about her??? If it means she can't learn to do their kind of magic then she's surprisingly disappointed about that although she's also not going to just give up on the spot.

It's going to be incredibly inconvenient if she has to learn their entire language the hard way. Merrin has never tried to learn a second language - her cipher doesn't count, it's syntactically identical to Baseline - but she assumes on priors that she's going to be unusually slow at it and it would take so much time. 

Dancing Lights; four medium-bright glowing spheres that form a square, spin.  Antonio touches one of the lights himself, waves his hand through it, to no effect.  "I'd like you to try doing that and see what happens.  Nothing should."

Probably it's not secretly Surprise Drugs ....Merrin's brain can quit it about the surprise drugs anxiety, which she's pretty sure is mostly standing in for all the more nebulous stressful uncertainties in her current situation; she's on edge about something, as many as several dozen somethings actually, it's not like her unease is actually mysterious or hard to explain. And she just watched Antonio do it and nothing bad happened. ...It's true that the entire point of the experiment is to see if something about her is different, but it sounds like the possible difference should make her less affected, not more. And she wants to know. 

Merrin is practiced at taking actions without flinching even if they're stressful. She pokes the glowing sphere. She's curious if it's going to feel like anything. 

It feels like nothing at all, but disrupts, twists in on itself, pops, as soon as she touches the outer surface of the glowing sphere.

".....I'm guessing that wasn't supposed to happen?" 

Merrin is now more uneasy but mostly it's being pushed aside by sheer desperate curiosity. Why??? Does this have fascinating implications for her theories about whether this world was selected as her destination by some purposeful optimizing force and if so then what are they it's not at all obvious to her yet (though it wouldn't be, she's thought about it for less than five seconds, most people aren't going to finish novel thoughts in five seconds and she takes longer than most people.) 

"It wasn't.  This is genuinely puzzling; it is not a statistically-expected thing - not a thing expected at all - I have no explanation for how this could be true and also you were able to be instantly-moved here.  Can you try touching another sphere while willing it not to disrupt, willing the magic to be allowed to enter yourself and pass through yourself?"

Well, there goes her fleeting hope that there would be an explanation obvious to the natives and she could just ask him and then be less confused! 

Sure, Merrin will try that, though she spends ten seconds or so first trying to get her attention and mental attitude lined up right, so she can try to will it very hard. 

Poof.  Gone.  Just like the last one.  Everything magical that she touches goes away, vanished as if it had never been.

"....I guess that means the translation magic won't work directed at me to allow me to speak your language? Um. What else does that mean. I'm also confused about the instantly-moving having worked! Because it seems like that would imply that I'm only immune to some categories of magic - what are the categories, we could test more of them - although actually it could instead be something even weirder than that."

Merrin is getting kind of tired of having all these gaping holes in her model of local reality and having to leave massive chunks of probability-mass on 'actually it's something else which I cannot possibly infer with the information I have.' It's going to take her so long to understand what's going ON sufficiently to stop feeling stressed and on edge and often unable to tell why! More than half of the other people on the plane are going to be having a way easier time of this and Merrin has never before felt this frustrated about her lower intelligence. She's not actually going to apologize out loud right now for being slow at absorbing new information, they've presumably noticed and decided not to comment on it - 

- actually, now that she's properly considering this, she's....confused. She is talking to someone who seems to be a very senior Governance official, with considerable authority, and she hadn't explicitly noticed it until now but she...mostly feels like she's holding her own, at least on a conversational verbal-fluency level. Which is really weird. This isn't what she would anticipate conversations with Very Important Senior Governance Officials feeling like at all! And she does have a base of comparison. It's hard to tell how much of it is an artifact of the translation spell not working well, either because APPARENTLY she is ANTI-MAGICAL or because the languages are just vastly different, which does seem like an expected observation for two different Civilizations evolving in complete isolation from each other... But it's odd and she should have explicitly noticed it sooner. 

This particular thought is transmitted to him in a tone of dry amusement by the seventh-circle.  Antonio is native 16!  He's just as smart as Merrin!  ...only with 5 points less Wisdom.

"We're presently inside an anti-instant-movement field, or I'd cast a lesser instant-movement spell to see whether that went through..."

"It's not an urgent matter, I don't think.  Greater wizards than myself will no doubt investigate this matter later."

"Except that - and I apologize for this - it was a matter of greater moment than I realized, to offer you foods not carefully and cautiously tested, if our healing spells would also not have worked on you.  Please try not to have any medical emergencies."

Merrin feels that she's already been trying pretty hard not to have any medical emergencies! It would be inconvenient and also she doesn't know anything about their healing magic and what it can do and how costly it is. 

She is very slightly disappointed that it might not work on her for...other reasons. Which are less relevant because she doesn't have a boyfriend right now. (Evidence...against...the Romance theory...??) 

"I'll be very careful," she agrees. "Anyway, now that we've clarified that, where was I - oh, right, the part where this world has extremely powerful agents with vastly more thinkoomph than humans and also it sounds like some of them have...goals aligned with increasing disorder and...acting for one's own benefit presumably at the expense of society overall? Because I have some serious concerns about that and also, um, how much of a humanitarian disaster the places-people-go-when-they-are-dead affiliated with them might be."

And whether that means she now needs to immediately pivot toward figuring out how to fix that instead? How? Whatever the fiddly details of the measurement scale, it does not seem like it should be possible to make much headway on a problem if a sort-of-like-an-ideal-agent being with four times your thinkoomph would prefer you didn't. 

"I think we had translation difficulties.  'Chaotic' is a word that this language tried to translate as entropy, but that's only one of several things that it is, it can also mean - strangeness, being different from others?"

"I suspect that there will be a number of aspects of Golarion, this planet, that you would regard as humanitarian disasters; I think that right now, when you are so freshly arrived, may not be the right time to go into them all."  Because he needs to figure out what to even say here.  "People who are too extremely 'Good' - 'Good' is being aligned to the benefit of society, on that axis - are familiar to us, and we know that such people may rush off and harm themselves in their urgency to fix everything.  It would be a humanitarian disaster if that happened to you, here, when healing spells don't work on you and you have knowledge we don't share.  I mark that you were taking a few moments to yourself, to organize your thoughts, which I do think you needed, and then you had a thought about others in trouble and rushed right back out again."

.....Merrin is slightly offended? Okay, fine, she's strongly altruistically motivated, it would be at all tempting for her to rush headlong into an emergency where she lacked essential context and wasn't prepared, but she is also very good at her job, and an essential element is not doing that even when it's very tempting. Rushing out in order to ask a question, the answer of which would factor very importantly in the next steps of organizing her thoughts, and where at no point was she in an even slightly dangerous situation or at risk of harming someone else by accident and lack of knowledge, seems like a completely different thing. 

"I maintain it was worth asking the question and I - observe that it took ten seconds to find out that the worst-case-scenario I was worrying about wasn't happening, and I'm still here, but that's because I keep finding out things that are going to completely reprioritize what I want to think about, so I think this conversation was worthwhile." 

(Merrin is notably a lot less...apologetic about the possibility of inconveniencing people or wasting their time, right now? She's focused; there's a bright clarity to her thoughts that wasn't there before, the emergency might not be on the scale of minutes but it's huge and Merrin has always functioned best under those circumstances.) 

...Though she might be focusing too closely on this particular aspect? And actually the next step is to go back to think in privacy and...figure out a list of possible workarounds or mitigating techniques for the translation problem? At which point maybe she can then go have an entire productive conversation without mistranslations that claim that 'increasing disorder' and 'being different from others' are somehow instances of the same underlying concept with no further explanation as to how this makes sense. 

"It does seem to be hitting diminishing returns on the new information now, so maybe I'll go do some further organizing."

She feels slightly reluctant, and...maybe part of it is just that she doesn't want to be alone in a room with no other humans that she can communicate with. Feeling isolated and lonely is really not the biggest problem on her plate, but it is a way she's feeling, and having someone speak to her in Baseline helps with that even if the magic keeps bizarrely mistranslating things, and she's always been better at working through complicated thoughts if she could bounce them off someone else - that's a known thing, it's not just her.

....She should absolutely not take up the very important Governance official's time just because she doesn't want to be alone in a room right now. There are the other students, who came along with the instant-movement magic? Pilar with the pink hair, and...awkwardly her working memory seems to have completely dropped the other two names. She thinks one of them started with an A phoneme? They don't have the translation magic to speak Baseline but they could at least understand her. (And, honestly, be way less intimidating. Merrin isn't worried about that right now because she's kind of still running in emergency mode and that makes 'intimidating' matter way less, but she needs to stop doing that at some point anyway, at which point she will probably again feel stressed about inconveniencing Antonio.) 

Antonio notes these thoughts, but as Merrin hasn't spoken her desires out loud, he will obviously not try to meet them.

...he's going to spend the next unknown period of time and maybe the rest of his career dealing with this enormous fucking paladin, isn't he.  Well, he's not actually going to complain; there are worse fates in Cheliax.  Quite a lot of them actually.

"I prefer you have much ontologically_basic-tendency_towards-outcomes_ranked_high_in_your_preference_ordering," Antonio says, which is apparently what 'good luck' translates to around these parts.  "That didn't translate, never mind."

It's going to be a long life.