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.) 

"Asmodia of Cheliax."

"Pilar Pineda of Cheliax."

Vicent points to Merrin, taps his ears, nods his head.  He points to his mouth, shakes his head.  Then he points to Sala, Pineda, and Asmodia in turn, taps his ears, and shakes his head.

Merrin thinks she understands what he's saying. 

(She...had not previously considered to what extent she would hate and be miserable in a situation where she could say things but not understand anything that other people said to her. It turns out that this is very frustrating.)

"- Right. My - current best guess - is that none of you speak Baseline because you're from another planet. But you have - some kind of magic, I guess - where you can understand me anyway? Only it doesn't also let you say things. - Can you all nod if that's true -"

Pause.

"....Um, actually, sorry, pause. I've been assuming that a nod," she demonstrates, "means yes here? And that a headshake," demonstration, "means no? ....Just as a test - I'll be happy to use the head signals later if it turns out we mutually understand them - but just as a test, can someone, um, knock over a chair if the answer is no? And - put one of the chairs up on one of the desks, if the answer is yes?" 

The convenient thing about this test is that if neither of those things happen, it will convey to her that they don't actually understand her at all, and the previous responses were a mix of wild guesses and reading body language. 

Vicent will have his Unseen Servant put a chair up on a desk.

Oh. Excellent. 

....Probably?

Merrin takes a deep breath. "Okay, if you can understand me but not answer me, because - magic - then I think we should probably try to figure out some kind of visual or mathematical system on my side, so that I can communicate? I...can draw a map of my world?"

Ugh she doesn't really expect that to work, though.

"....Sorry, I'm going to keep trying to think of things, but I'm - not having a great day. Which is distracting, it turns out. I - sorry - my math and spatial skills are worse than my verbal skills but if you think you can draw things or whatever more easily then you can figure out the language problem then I'll try my best." 

He's still got his Silent Image running, though at present it's not producing an illusion of anything but air.

Illusion:  Vicent, Merrin, three students not depicted in as much detail, meet a sixth person.  They vanish, then reappear inside a vaguely depicted formal hall.  A formally dressed figure steps forward, taps his lips, nods.

....If Merrin is following that correctly then they have instantaneous point to point transportation. What. Seriously? 

- should that be such a major update? She was clearly instantaneously transported here, and she doesn't yet have an explanation for that but she knows it happened to the extent that she knows anything, anymore ....unhelpful thought, maybe also wrong but definitely not productive. 

The fantasy-magic-instructor was visibly confused about her? Which is evidence that even if they locally have instantaneous point-to-point transport magic, he doesn't recognize whatever made her appear here?

....Merrin isn't sure what that means. Probably it means something? If she were higher-g she might get it at a first glance, and - also it would be more likely that someone would have taught her the underlying truths she needed to know. But that is not her current situation. (She would appreciate if there were a clear explanation document and a trained instructor available for all her questions, but it's not like this is the first time in her life that she's gone without that.)

Anyway. She isn't yet, exactly, suspicious about whether the fantasy magic teacher in the fantasy magic academy setting is being honest with her. But she's considering that he might not be. Merrin's real life experience hasn't involved any truly adversarial actions, but her Exception Handling training as an EMT has, and she didn't like it but she tried her best to acquire the relevant skills anyway. 

Oh right she should say words. 

"...So if I'm understanding you correctly: you can take me somewhere else quickly using magic, with some of the other students, and there'll be another person there who can use magic to answer my questions? You can nod if that's right, and - if that's what you think makes sense to do next, I think I don't have a better alternative to following your judgement there." 

Merrin is mostly not showing it on her face, but she's still feeling very unhappy.

She doesn't like being thrown outside her area of expertise, and being confused is painful for her, whether or not she's having to at the same time handle a medical emergency. (There doesn't appear to be one and she is unendorsedly resentful about this.) 

- and she's still sad about missing her date. She could really go for someone hurting her a whole lot right now Merrin has no idea that her mind is currently being read, but she's in the habit of noticing that thought and quickly tucking it away for LATER. (It's an infohazard, after all, and the easiest way to avoid accidentally talking about her secret infohazardous personality trait with her friends is to minimize how much it's on her mind, and it's not like there's any actually good reason for it to be relevant now. Whoever the fantasy magic people are, they don't need to know that she's still stupidly upset about missing her date, let alone why.)

Vicent nods when Merrin asks for a nod.

As Detect Thoughts is something less of an overpowered spell in the hands of distracted second-circle wizard students, Ione is able to notice that Merrin hid a thought about her date but not what the thought was, or why she's hiding it.

...why would anybody from a nonmagical world need to hide their thoughts at all??  If Ione lived in a world where Detect Thoughts wasn't a thing, she would -

- nonetheless think only good thoughts that were loyal to Cheliax, of course.

She duly Messages Vicent about it anyways.

A rather more portly and older man huffs ungraciously into the classroom, scowls at the five people present for Teleportation (that's going to take a bit of metamagic from a rod with limited daily uses), and, after a few incomprehensible Taldane words exchanged with Vicent, extends out his arm.

Vicent lays a hand on it, as do Ione, Pilar, Asmodia.

"Merrin," Vicent says encouragingly.

Oh, clearly she's supposed to do - something?

(...That man's breathing sounds kind of concerning? Which Merrin figures is any evidence toward 'this is a training scenario that Governance/her instructors have somehow managed to pull off, and wanted to subject her to for reasons she doesn't know'. Though that's not a very satisfying explanation, given all of the impossibilities she has recently observed. Merrin...will keep an eye on the potential medical emergency, which she would do anyway, but otherwise go on assuming that she died and then ended up on another planet where magic exists -) 

- probably the something she is supposed to do involves imitating the other magic-academy-students? Merrin nods to Vicent and reaches out to place her hand next to Asmodia's. 

Sudden sensory discontinuity!  Merrin is now in what passes for a formal reception platform in Golarion, a marble dais with an inlaid fancy gold pentagram (not one usable for summoning purposes, as is obvious to anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with that), surrounded by magical floating crimson ribbons like guardrails.  There's some surprise at their arrival, as two tall men dressed in identical-looking uniforms bark out a Taldane question which Vicent answers swiftly and in commanding terms of his own.

The portly man vanishes, not taking anybody with him this time, and the others all file off the platform and head out of the nearest door.

There isn't really a lot of time to look, but one will quickly start to pick up a general doompunk ambiance around here - the walls are done up in decor that looks like subtly stylized flames, for example, that fade into shadow as they approach a darker ceiling.  The rounded corners of the reception platform room appear as pillars holding up the ceiling with claws.  Unfortunately this is not sufficiently close to dath ilani doompunk to convey anything like a reassuring familiarity.

Oh NO!  The anomaly has MOVED.  Why are these mortals teleporting the anomaly AROUND?  It could cause more DAMAGE that way!

Well.  She is at least not allowing that to happen AGAIN.  Otolmens puts up an antimagical shell around the anomaly that will prevent external magical effects from affecting it.

(It does not block divination.  Otolmens can think of several past anomalies that She would not particularly have wanted to make magically invisible.  It doesn't block anything internal in case that further perturbs the anomaly.)

That sure is an aesthetic! Merrin notices that it's not exactly the doompunk she's familiar with, although honestly it would be weird if it was. ...Okay, it's weird anyway. She tries to get a better look at the pillars, in case the architecture here tells her something about the non-magical tech level, but she doesn't have a lot of time to look and she's not an engineer and also who knows if they're keeping the ceiling up half with magic levitation. She really needs to figure out how expensive magical effects are, here. She's pretty sure that's something that varies between settings, not that she's had time to read all that much fantasy since she was a kid. 

...It looks like their arrival maybe wasn't communicated ahead? Which could mean that long-distance magical communication isn't a thing, or that it's costly, or it could just mean that someone involved is slightly disorganized and they don't have a checklist to follow for 'unexpected visitor from another world.' Either way it looks like no harm was done? 

The initial room did look very - fancy? Moreso than the classroom. If things like inlaid gold are scarce here - she thinks gold was scarce in some of the fiction she read? - then significant wealth was put into this room's decor. Which says...something...about how important they're treating her as? Though Merrin feels like really she is trying to draw inferences from a very small number of observations, so anything she does infer will still mostly amount to a wild guess. She might be better off just waiting until they reach the person who can speak her language. 

She follows the instructor and the other students. (She doesn't notice the antimagic shell around her.) 

Shortly beyond the doompunk teleportation platform is a fancy doompunk diplomatic reception area that's so expensive it looks only slightly poverty-stricken by dath ilani standards!  Why, most teenaged kids don't have a room in their house that looks this nice!  Unless they're working at an unusually high-paying job!

In the reception area can be found another couple of people in uniforms identical to the two stationed on the teleportation platform, and one person behind a desk wearing in total solemn seriousness a doompunk LARP outfit from a planet with almost no textiles technology.  Somehow it still manages to convey, even across the vast cultural gap, that this person might possibly work for Governance.

There's some more words exchanged in Taldane, level ones with nobody looking visibly surprised at any point.  Then the person behind the desk rises up and goes through one of two doors behind him.

Now there's a wait, apparently?

Merrin pays a lot of attention to her surroundings. She has extensive training on doing that and noticing as many details as possible.

...Well, most of her training is specific either to noticing people in need of medical care, or environmental hazards that might cause less-careful people to end up in need of medical care. And so she is substantially less skilled at noticing-and-efficiently-chunking any non-medical-emergency and non-hazardous observations in her environment. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately, really, for everyone involved, just not for Merrin's ability to use her skills), nobody nearby is having a medical emergency. (She would judge the competence of their local Governance at least a little if one of the greeters sent for her did have a medical emergency and she was the first responder).

Also the local architecture seems pretty non-hazardous, which is unsurprising in general, except for the increasingly-unlikely possibility where this is some bizarre troll-y training scenario aimed at her specifically, which - at this point she has substantial evidence against?? Probably? 

She will wait. Trying to do any lowkey social interactions with the fellow students (who are closer to her age than the teacher) is mostly a lost cause, given the language problem, but she tries to smile at all of them.

- oh, wow, one of them has interesting hair! Merrin finds herself smiling at Pilar in particular. 

Does it serve Asmodeus for Pilar to smile back?  Yes?  Then Pilar will smile back.

Somebody new comes back out from the door behind the desk.  He's wearing a higher-quality version of the last person's probably-an-official doompunk LARP uniform.

"On behalf of local Governance, welcome to Cheliax, Merrin out of dath ilan," he says in Baseline.  "I am Antonio Agramunt, fourth-degree_of_complexity learned_economicmagic-user and empowered-representative of Chelish Governance.  My, what a fascinating language this is, I've never spoken anything like it."

Someone is talking in a language she understands! For a second or two, that is the only part that Merrin can really process, and she is beaming about it, with relief and exhaustion and - 

- and right, she is representing Civilization in a diplomatic negotiation with aliens? Maybe? Apparently? 

Right. She can do this. 

(Merrin is pretty sure that she is really not the best person for this? But it seems like whatever process caused her to be here, and did not instead cause a different person to be here, either doesn't care or disagrees, and - it's not clear that she has any way of finding out which one. So. She - might as well act on the assumption that she is at least a reasonable person to be selected to make contact with an alien world?) 

"Thank you," she says. "I'm very glad to meet you. ...I - sorry - my first question was going to be, can you ask the teacher and students who saw me arrive what they saw? But I'm also suddenly really curious what's different between this language and the others you know?" 

"To say in Taldane that I was suddenly really curious, I would say, 'I'm suddenly really curious'."  It's ten syllables instead of Baseline's three.  "It's clearly a language that makes very different messages simple or complicated to say.  And you don't have any simple words for economicmagics of different degrees of complexity, which backs up Vicent's early speculations about your world lacking economicmagic entirely."

"I'll ask your question of the others; give me a moment there."

Okay but WHY would anyone come up with a language that took that many syllables to convey such a basic and surely-frequently-expressed sentiment? 

Merrin waits for him to ask the others and then give her the summary. In the meantime, she'll examine his higher-quality probably-a-diplomat doompunk uniform more closely. And also make eye contact with the other economicmagic students again, because why not, they're the closest to her age here and it makes her feel less lonely. 

Antonio Agramunt's uniform is made out of threads coarse enough to be visible, in a 2-axis weave that's so uneven it doesn't look up close like a neat grid at all.  No zippers, nothing that looks magnet-augmented, no sign of a buried hood he could pull over his head if it starts raining.  The doompunk aesthetics are conveyed entirely by coloration and some decorations of shiny colored metal, managing to do a surprising job at conveying anything through that language.

Pilar Pineda is most cheerful about returning eye contact; from Ione Sala and Asmodia it seems more measured, restrained, careful.  Not visibly nervous at all.  Nobody flinches to meet her gaze.

After some exchanges in Taldane between Antonio and the others, Antonio reports to Merrin that all four witnesses agree that she was not there in one moment, and there in the Ostenso wizard academy classroom the next.  Vicent in particular has a reasonably high-grade ability to perceive economicmagic and didn't see any associated economagical phenomena upon her arrival.

"- I can't say that I'm surprised," Merrin says to Antonio. "I - guess I was just hoping that your economicmagic would have - seen something more informative than that - but that's basically just what I experienced. I wish I could tell you more." 

Pilar Pineda...looks like the sort of person who'd be really great to do an intense EMT shift with...?

- Merrin is not at all sure what to make of that impression. She generally has a certain level of calibrated trust in her surface impressions but who knows if that applies at all on another planet. 

"Your clothes are an outlier-with-respect-to-our-expectations in their sophistication and complexity," what an incredible language, Antonio doesn't even understand that thing he just said.  "It's an obvious thought to inquire whether you perhaps come from a place that would have more ideas than we did about what happened.  May I ask - what manner of person you may be, and what is this place of dath ilan that sent you?"

- The first question is way easier. And probably she shouldn't throw too much information his way at once– okay fine actually she just wants a reason to limit how much she has to think about right now. 

"I'm an emergency-medical-responder. My specialty is endurance, as in - emergencies that last a long time and where you can only send one person in - I'm the person you would send, I have the natural ability and also the training for it. ....I've done a lot of training for Exception Handling but in real life I haven't really dealt with any exceptions before - this."

Interesting.  "Are you then a - your language has no word for 'cleric'.  Or 'god'.  Fascinating.  How does one respond to medical emergencies without economicmagic to heal people?"

What??? 

"......That is going to take me a really long time to explain and I should at least check with you first whether that's the best use of your presumably-limited ability to speak my language." 

- there were two mysterious words in there and it seems in context like they were probably important?

"We are at present trying to triage you as to where you fall within Cheliax's priorities-for-limited-allocation-of-resources, and from your clothes alone I would guess that you are a woman expecting accomodations and treatment that we would usually reserve for only a few; the question of whether you can be useful to us is, I admit, not far from our thoughts."

...expecting accommodations??? Merrin wasn't expecting anything here, she doesn't think–

- well, she was expecting to be DEAD, which is not all that difficult to improve upon. 

(It is possible that Merrin would in general have some mental flinches around being considered important or worth attention from Governance.) 

- He used the word 'triage', which might just be a magic-translation thing and maybe his underlying concept is very different, but it still leaves her a little more inclined to positive feelings about him. 

"...I would like to figure out how I can be useful here," she says, "but I think it will be a lot easier to do that once I'm less incredibly confused about - your world, and how it works, and also how and why I ended up here." 

"I'm honestly not sure of where to start," says Antonio; without the thought particularly occurring to him that anybody might find it very odd that somebody tried to claim they were being honest in the course of transmitting information at all, given that any question as to its veracity would likely apply to the meta-claim of its being honest.  "Well, I propose that we at least find a nice room with a place for you to sit, provide you with some food and drink.  Perhaps allow you a few minutes to catch your breath and think," under appropriate telepathic supervision.  "We can, I think, provide you with such as would be appropriate to the highest level of visiting dignitary.  But continuing the same level of hosting after that would depend on a longer conversation we would then have, about what we can do for each other."

If 'Merrin' is not a cleric nor a wizard,  she shouldn't have much in the way of Will saves?  Probably?  The previous round of Detect Thoughts worked on her with no sign she noticed.  But she was distracted then, and Antonio is not quite sure that they should make assumptions about what people from another and nonmagical world can do.  A Chelish diplomat trying Suggestions is riskier, if it fails, than somebody noticing some disposable wizard students tried to read her mind after she burst into their classroom uninvited.

He'll get a more senior wizard in to try those, Antonio thinks.

Merrin is too distracted to notice anything odd about the 'honestly' that was dropped in there, aside from maybe a vague unease which is immediately lost in the much larger pool of pre-existing vague unease about everything she's experienced in the last twenty minutes. 

...the highest level of visiting dignitary what? Does that mean she's supposed to...do...anything...? 

Oh good they're offering her a few minutes to sit down and catch her breath? Great! That's considerate of them. Merrin suddenly likes this person about 30% more. 

"Thank you. I would appreciate that– um, if anything really urgent comes up, I can be functional as required within my domain of expertise, I think? But...if you want me to do more general reasoning and communication then, yes, I could really use some time to sit down and catch my breath." 

Merrin doesn't seem to have a lot of Bluff and, if that seeming is at all true, reads as basically just not picking up on the hints that she's got to play nice in order to keep the nice things that will be offered her?

Maybe this woman actually is just exhausted and scared after ending up in another plane?  Pretty pathetic if so.  She's not even visibly wounded.

Antonio considers offering Merrin a Lesser Restoration, decides against it, there'll be time later to see how she responds when less fatigued and for now this may be useful.

"Come along, then," says Antonio.  He takes a few steps forward, towards the other door behind the desk (not the one he originally emerged from), and beckons Merrin to follow.

Merrin follows, still emotionally if not physically exhausted and still oblivious to any of the subtext. (Even if she were paying very close attention, which she isn't, 'she's pathetic for being scared after ending up in another plane' would be such low-priors subtext according to Merrin's experiences so far.) 

She is, instead, dwelling on the fact that EVEN IF the Keepers know that actually True Death isn't even a thing and that every time someone would otherwise permanently cease to exist, they end up in a random economicmagic fantasy setting instead - well, they're not going to tell her parents. And so her parents and her boyfriends and her colleagues and everyone she's ever met or cared for in her entire life is going to, right now, be thinking that she's gone. Forever. No more Merrin.

...They'll be all right. She has to believe that Merrin catches this thought before it's quite formed because obviously that is not how anything works. But - at the very least it's still true that dwelling on that more right now is not going to help her parents or anyone else. And that it will help HER if she can focus on her current situation. 

(For whatever it's worth, fully three of Merrin's boyfriends are pre-Keeper-cleared to a level where they will be told the much more disturbing truth about the Isekai Theory of Immortality.  But not her parents and family, no.)

Merrin will be led through a couple of doompunk-themed hallways to a relatively brighter (still indoors) room which offers her a glass and a selection of wines and juices to pour into it, and a variety of primitive low-tech light snacks.

Antonio will stick around to see if Merrin has questions about those, rather than leaving her alone.  ETA on the seventh-circle wizard called in from elsewhere in the palace is still a couple of minutes, and he doesn't want Merrin left alone until they can snoop her thoughts properly.

This place is so weirdly doompunk! Well. Slightly off doompunk. Merrin could give them some constructive criticism, if for some reason she wanted to do that. It seems like not at all the priority here. 

...Okay they're offering her things to drink? None of them are warm. She kind of wants something warm, right now, but not badly enough to ask for it and maybe inconvenience someone. 

(Merrin has spent a lot of time and effort on training herself to be more comfortable inconveniencing other people, but she's particularly out of her depth right now and so falling back on older mental habits.) 

She sits down and pours a random beverage into her glass and sips it. 

A fine old Westcrown vintage of thirty years ago!

What in the name of nuclear-waste-contaminated wet wipes is this supposed to be???? 

...On the one hand, if they're poisoning her and she just goes on drinking the poison because she doesn't want to offend the locals, that would be stupid, and not even an interesting kind of stupid?

On the other hand, if they're trying to poison her then probably all of these are poisoned. Also they have literal magic. If they're trying to kill her for any reason then– well, maybe the worst case scenario here is that she finds herself on a different random fantasy planet? Since that's apparently how True Death works?? 

...on the other other hand she could just...ask. Maybe she has different biology than the apparently-human locals. 

"Is this supposed to taste like something poisonous?" 

"...no.  Hm.  Do you have -"

"Your language contains no word for 'wine' or several related beverages.  I wonder if it wouldn't have its standard-expected-causal-effect on you, or if it would work but your faction has prohibited it as some factions do?"

Antonio indicates the lighter-colored liquids.  "These are fruit juices, which perhaps may be more to your taste since terminology for the concept exists within your language.  If not, I'll have plain water brought for you, and if that doesn't work, we may have a problem."

Merrin is apparently now VERY CURIOUS about the standard-expected-causal-effect of the beverage that Baseline doesn't have a word for! 

...This is not in any way a good reason for her to drink it, though. Merrin knew by the time she was five or six that "but I want to know what happens!" was - not necessarily a temptation that she shouldn't follow, but one where she should at least do some research first. 

....She's still curious. 

"Thank you. I think I'd like to try one of the fruit juices -" is there another glass she can use that isn't already full of Mystery Substance? "- but, um, I'm actually really curious what the expected effect is? If it's not poisoning you." Which it tastes like it should but she doesn't need to repeat that. 

"Increased relaxation although-that's-not-actually-an-accurate-description?  I would not have offered it to you if I had not expected you to already know what it was, a folly for which I apologize."

Being more relaxed sounds like it might be useful, right now? She's still inconveniently jittery from the thing where she ALMOST DIED. Or maybe actually died. She's not sure what to call it at this point. 

However. Apparently it's a psychoactive drug??? Why? Is it just a normal thing here to offer visitors psychoactive-drug-laced beverages? Without telling them what they ARE– ...he did acknowledge that he assumed she would know what it was, which is maybe an easy mistake to make, Merrin assumes she's making some assumptions that are at least that awkward. But still. She is apparently STILL CURIOUS about the mysterious psychoactive beverage but now is not the time actually. Especially since he said explicitly that 'increased relaxation' wasn't a fully accurate translation of the effects. 

".....I think I would rather have plain water. If that's all right." 

"Of course," he says graciously and apologetically.  "I could also have simple fruits brought for you, if you have analogously-structured worries about the hidden-complexity-dangers of the overcomplicated snacks."

What a fascinating language.  It really says something about the people who must speak it that they have a single-syllable word for 'overcomplicated' and a two-syllable word for 'dangers hidden within complications', which isn't even quite what Antonio was thinking, but it's the word that came out.  Their contracts and compacts must be works of technique and art on par with this woman's clothing.

"....Um, I wasn't previously worried about the snacks but are they also known to have - psychoactive effects other than the usual ones you'd expect from taking in calories?" 

Merrin had thought it would be more relaxing or relieving or something, to have someone here able to communicate with her? Instead she keeps feeling like she's missing something - as though there's an object just right at the edge of her peripheral vision - 

- probably she's just stressed about the entire situation. And she should try to focus and stop obsessively paying attention to any possible indication that the stranger from another world is upset with her, and instead think about how to explain things. 

Antonio separates out one of the snacks.  "This one was made with 'liquor', which is a specialcase-of-a-supercase of the 'wine' I offered you.  Aside from that, everything here should be not psychoactive.  And the amount of liquor in that snack would not be enough to have a least-perceptible-effect, assuming-all-rules-operated-as-expected."

Huh. Merrin isn't sure why they put drugs into a random selecting of their foods and beverages here? The fact that they do is leaving her kind of dubious about the whole selection; she's not all that hungry anyway, so she might as well hold off. 

She sips the water he brings her, and tries to think. 

(If anyone is paying attention: most of her thoughts are about her parents, and the boyfriend she was flying to see, and the four-year-old on the plane with her - she's wondering if he's also recently woken up in another world - is he all right, there, that would be terrifying it's hard to even imagine and she doesn't want to but she's trained herself not to flinch away from things she doesn't want to think about, or at least to flinch less...) 

(There is no even-slightly-believable possible world where should could have stopped it from happening. She's not an engineer and she couldn't have been, she barely scraped past the qualifying tests to be an EMT which isn't even very g-loaded, and yet it's still incredibly tempting to think that if only she'd studied harder, if only she'd signed up for more trainings, if only she had done enough then she could have fixed it–-) 

...Merrin recognizes that line of thought. None of the usual things she would do about it are available, except for 'distractions', but there's no shortage of those. 

After a couple of minutes, "- I can answer questions now. Or, um, if it's easier on your end for me to start, I can give an explanation of what just happened from my point of view? ...I'm probably not up for explanations on the level of putting rigorous probability estimates on everything but I can do the basics." 

Merrin is pretty sure that she's messing up first contact with an alien world VERY BADLY, but to be fair no one SAID it was important for her to do trainings about this, or to read more science fiction, which she hasn't had time or spare cognitive capacity for since she was, like, twelve. 

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. 

- 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.

Aww, that's an odd thing to say and clearly not what he was going for but it's kind of sweet? 

Merrin returns to the room and settles in to write some more and nibble some more fruit, oblivious to Antonio's frustration with her paladin-ness. (Not that she has the slightest idea what a paladin is, just yet)

She did manage to notice that he seemed to disapprove of the sense of urgency she's currently feeling? As a small child, rather too much of Merrin's attention was aimed at picking up on disapproval from adults. As an adult, she's tried to have it bother her less, both for reasons of general psychological health and because, in fact, in emergency situations now she usually has to be the authority. She hasn't lost her sensitivity to perceiving it at all, though. 

Obviously it bothers her at least a little - she's very out of her depth here and so anything mildly negative is going to get to her more - but she's also noticing some irritation. Even though what he said was clearly intended to look out for her wellbeing and it wasn't wrong advice, just imperfectly targeted. There's just...something implicit in there that rubs her the wrong way, and that's unusual, most of the authority figures Merrin has interacted with her life were very very good at giving advice in a way that didn't give off the impression that she was inconveniencing them by caring as hard as she did. 

Well, cultural differences, right, she should be expecting a much higher frequency of minor social missteps and fumbles. Maybe he's also irritated with her for an impression that she didn't at all intend to convey. 

(...Merrin is now flagging-to-herself a mild concern that she's going to be overly hasty to explain things by claiming 'cultural differences' and then moving on, even though at this point 'cultural differences' is more like a label on an opaque box than a concept with parts that she can reason with usefully; it's not really an answer. Not in the way that means she ought to stop trying to ask questions. If she wants to figure this place out enough to feel at ease - which seems pretty important for her work productivity, actually - then she needs an actual detailed model of what all the nebulous cultural differences are.) 

...How do they select Governance officials, anyway? This isn't a top-priority question to resolve, necessarily, but she writes it down. And then she returns to her paper that has 'DEATH' written at the top and the rest blank, and fills in all the details she just learned. 

And taking a step back again. Can she make any further progress on narrowing down probabilities for the various possible reasons she might have been directed here on purpose? (She is obviously going to put in a placeholder for ACTUALLY IT'S SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY and allocate it at least half of her probability mass, but other than that.) 

...Seems a lot less likely she's here to fix medicine; this world has a systematic setup where dead people end up in other worlds, they don't need a fix for True Death, and they have healing magic. Also she keeps finding out about new bizarre complications, at a rate that seems to be increasing rather than decreasing over time, and at this point she should really just update that it's likely to keep happening for a while, and stop trying to make PLANS other than gathering-more-information. 

She is apparently INHERENTLY ANTI-MAGIC which is...informative, right, it's something she would have assigned very low probability before it turned out to be true, and apparently Antonio, who has local context, also would have, and so it's a huge update. Would be great if she had any idea what it was an update toward. 

- evidence that she's in one of the worlds that was selected for her, maybe? Because it seems purposeful. It seems to Merrin that there's a large difference between she, herself, not having the aptitude to learn economicmagic, because that's something the humans of this world have and dath ilanis don't, and having some kind of immunity field to it that actively disrupts magic that was already cast. 

She is noticing that she's suddenly full of wobbly-uncertainty about whether that's true? Which is the usual point at which she would go check her reasoning with someone, ideally someone with at least some Keeper training, but she can't do that, can she. She can't even really ask Antonio because apparently anything complicated or where there's a large inferential distance between their two worlds' knowledge bases fails to translate. 

(- actually, jumping back, right, she needs to think about the translation problem and how to mitigate it, but she's going to start a new sheet of paper for that and then go back to it later, she feels like she's holding onto a lot of other half-finished thoughts right now and doesn't want to drop them.) 

Things which are evidence she can maybe use at all for the question of why she's here, if it's for a reason? ...She still needs to find out if it's possible to communicate with the dead people in the dead-people-places - or whether the instant-movement magic works to travel between them, which seems plausible and also that would be so cool you could collect so much fascinating data if you could just go meet and interview everyone who's ever died in the last however many centuries. If the only way of knowing things about them is what's communicated by 'gods', though - assuming 'gods' communicate with humans at all, but Merrin is leaning toward yes, Antonio was talking about it like someone who thought he had reasonably good information on 'Asmodeus' goals - but if that's the only channel of information then Merrin is going to downgrade her confidence in all of that. There's an argument that it would result in better information, right, if gods are something like super-Keepers, but they...sound weirder than that, they might be a lot weirder than that, and so...uncertainty. 

That's at least five questions but Merrin will write it down and then go to a new piece of paper to start writing down a neater list. 

That's so many things. It's so many things and they're all confusing and she has to make her own checklists - not just that, she has to figure out the entire framework-of-reasoning to use in order to prioritize what goes on them - which is not, in fact, something Merrin is especially trained to do, because why would you try to make a Merrin do that. She's starting to feel like her brain is going to explode and then there will be little bits of Merrin-brain everywhere and no answers and no plans. 

....Okay, but you know what Merrin IS trained to do, and noted to have some actual aptitude for which is why she invested in all that training? Dealing with STRESSFUL THINGS. Including - especially - unexpected stressful things being sprung on her from nowhere, because it's not as though Civilization gets to have much say in scheduling Exceptions happening, they wouldn't be Exceptions if that were the case. 

It's taken her a decade of very focused effort and diligence to get to where she is in her original career, and it might take another decade of completely refocusing all her efforts to handle this - or, let's be honest, it might take a whole lot longer than that - but if Merrin were the sort of person to just GIVE UP because something was going to take decades of intense diligence and stubbornness, she wouldn't be where she is now, would she. 

Okay. Great. Moving on. Possible solutions to the translation issue:

- Merrin just learns their language. This is a bad solution because by itself it'll take months if not years and she doesn't want to spend months to years being this incredibly confused all the time. 

- ....Actually though she should probably request tutoring at all in their language, not so much expecting she can learn to speak it in a day, but at least to get a high-level overview of the differences so she can compensate for them more informedly? Not from Antonio, obviously, his time is high-value and he probably has all sorts of other work to do related to her arrival. (Merrin is suddenly deeply curious what their equivalent of Exception Handling protocols are, because wow she sure is an Exception from their point of view, and learning how another Civilization deals with that sounds incredible. She's in the middle of thinking about something else, though, so she'll put that down on the list of other questions, along with 'how do you select Governance officials.' 

- ...Break things down into smaller parts. Merrin could try explaining things as though she's talking to an injured five-year-old who's going to struggle to process anything complicated or embedded-in-high-levels-of-context. She....would not normally try to have a conversation with an actual injured five-year-old about any of her current questions, that's a hurdle, but it seems worth trying the mental attitude. 

- Use more visual aids? They've got visual aids, here, clearly, and when they showed her the planet, that as a method of communication wasn't prone to language-translation lossiness. ....Actually that's a good point. If she can just go out and see more of their world, herself, then she may not know how to interpret all of it but at least it would help her form more concrete questions? And whatever she could infer might be incorrect because of her own preconceptions, priors which were appropriate in dath ilan but not here, but at least it won't be incorrect because of translation-magic bugginess. 

- They should obviously run a whole lot more experiments to mark out the limits of her anti-magical properties. Maybe, maybe, there's something more like the instant-movement magic - which did work on her - but which would serve a purpose like the translation spell? ....Merrin has no idea if that could be a thing, she should ask about the subcategories of economicmagic here. That goes on the questions list. 

- Do they have anyone who could learn Baseline the normal way but really fast? If they have beings with 4x the thinkoomph of the average human - it's probably not a good use of Asmodeus' time to spend a day learning Baseline properly, presumably if one is a god one has a lot of other priorities, but seems worth asking the general question. 

- ......On a similar line of thought, can they somehow make Merrin smarter, so she can learn their language in less than several months to years? Merrin isn't putting high odds on that being possible, the only indication she has to think it might be is that gods exist, but it's cheap to ask so why not. 

Merrin finishes her notes on that sheet of paper and sets it aside. 

(Paper is really not a great user interface, but this is among the least of Merrin's challenges right now.) 

No one has interrupted her yet and she's not done thinking, just - at a good pausing point? 

Merrin knows what her mind needs to help her switch gears. She tidies her many cipher-covered papers and then gets up and does some pushups and jumping jacks and some sort of wall-balancing exercise, all the while trying to have as few abstract thoughts as possible. 

Antonio Agramunt is currently agonizing - metaphorically, but it's going to end up literal - about whether Merrin is successfully reading through his Bluff or just picking up on the overtones that he'd meant to put there, based on the description of her thoughts.

Asking to be relieved of duties that might be unpleasant, in Cheliax, is something painfully discouraged, so people won't go around asking to be relieved of unpleasant duties just because they're unpleasant; the resulting punishment, from a Chelish perspective, must be severe enough and extended enough to discourage that as a calculation.  Of course failing in those duties is much more severely discouraged, especially in a case like this one, and if you think you might fail and earn that punishment, you'd be wiser to take the lesser one.  Forcing your superiors to relieve you by looking incompetent, but without you having actually failed at that point, is a discouraged intermediate between the two.  Ideally, of course, one can just take on the unpleasant duty and perform it perfectly, and then not be punished at all aside from the duty itself.  The question is whether Antonio Agramunt is sufficiently confident he can do that.

Excellent. She has some PLANS to communicate better. 

...No one's interrupted her yet, and she doesn't actually feel done with her thinking, since she still needs to figure out what she wants to use that communication to learn more about. 

Right. Skimming through previous notes (wow paper continues to be a terrible user interface, there's no longer enough space on the table for all her notes and Merrin swaps to sitting on the floor surrounded by a semicircle of papers):

Topics to ask questions about 

- Gods: she needs to go more concrete on this. What human-visible activities do gods take. How do they communicate. Do they...trade with humans? Do they trade with each other? How do they come into existence? Are they like a species that can reproduce? 

- Dead-people-places: what does each of them look like, visually, assuming this is known? (Seems less fraught to ask for the showing-images magic than do battle with the translation issues.) What do the people there actually do? Can dead people who now 'live' there have children who are born there? If children born here die and go there then do they continue to age or are they children forever? Do they have economies? Do they have magic users there as well and are they the same people who were wizards in life? 

- Magic: what can it do, what can't it do, can be it broken down into categories, how long does it take to learn to a certain skill, how rare is it, how is it used in the day-to-day operation of Cheliax? 

- The non-magical economy and logistics and Governance and legal system of Cheliax: agricultural production, metalwork, transport (how broadly do they use the instant-transport magic versus non-magical methods), how do they select leaders, what are the divisions within their government with different spheres of responsibility, she's probably forgetting twenty other important aspects but hopefully the questions will start occurring to her as she learns more.

- The culture of Cheliax (Merrin isn't expecting this to be easy to explain, she's pretty sure it's a trope in encountering-aliens fiction that 'culture' is hard to perceive directly by the people within it, like fish in water, but she can break it down into a lot of specific questions and compare to dath ilan and maybe noting a lot of specific differences will make this clearer).

- Their education, and not just magical. This is informative both from an understanding-the-culture standpoint, and because she...has a sense that a great deal of dath ilan's progress in pedagogy happened once they had less resource scarcity than this world apparently does? Education, too, is a kind of technology. Merrin is incredibly unqualified to be a teacher unless it's 'teaching six-year-olds basic first aid' but she at least went to school. (Also she has a very vague recollection of reading some encountering-another-civilization serial fiction where the other civilization couldn't afford to educate all of their children, what with all the resource scarcity, and she should...check. If that's the case here.) 

- Their history, if it's not screened off. She...is going to guess it's probably not? She isn't sure why she has that sense, presumably there's some kind of input going into the anticipation but it's not legible even to herself yet. But she thinks history is less invisible-to-the-locals than 'culture' and should still inform it a lot, and inconveniently she won't as easily be able to compare differences with dath ilan, but by getting it from both angles maybe she can come up with an actual model and then she'll...be less confused, and be able to figure out more easily how to work with them and fit herself in.

Interrupting this with a thought that Merrin is not going to write down because it's WEIRD and KIND OF TERRIFYING and she needs to think a lot more about whether it's an infohazard: what if the history being screened off is that dath ilan ALSO had magic and GODS and the Keepers didn't want anyone to know this?

...Seems weird that they would try to screen off the existence of dead-people-places and - maybe?? - prevent almost everyone from going there by instead cryopreserving them? Oh, right, and also Merrin didn't. (End up in a standard place-where-dead-people-go, that is, she ended up somewhere but if they're being honest with her then it's the place where living people are.) So it doesn't especially fit that dath ilan could ever have been exactly like Golarion, and maybe the entire hypothesis is just overactive pattern-matching on her part. She...is going to put it aside for now until she has more information to assess it, and try not to freak out excessively about it in the meantime. 

Now to reassess her priority list–

....Actually she should probably think some more about what kinds of things could go wrong if she just starts taking actions toward the obvious-to-her-right-now priorities. Merrin is fairly sure that there are lots of examples of this in fiction. If only she had read more of it. 

There's the 'unintended consequences of rapid change' side, that's obvious in principle but predicting the actual problems in advance is not. There was some plot she remembers where giving the aliens steelworking technology had...some kind of political consequences? There was clearly a model-of-the-causality there and Merrin did not mostly follow it (she might, possibly, have been skimming a lot of sections that weren't medical-related) but that can go on her list of Things That Might Happen. Which social equilibria are stable is affected by a lot of factors. - oh right that was the same novel where someone taught the aliens how to do reproductive control and that caused some kind of major social shift? She should find out if Cheliax has reliable birth control. 

Merrin is fairly sure those aren't the only concerns or even the only categories of concerns, but trying to predict any others just on general knowledge and, like, five facts about Cheliax is not working at all. She doesn't feel as though she has a generative model of it at all, just - a handful of half-remembered examples that other people who did have models came up with. 

It feels like the obvious solution is to sort out the translation issues and come to fully understand Cheliax's culture and then she'll be able to just talk to people like Antonio about her concerns and they can fill in the context she doesn't know and then she won't be trying to juggle all of the considerations ALONE and everything will be FINE.

Merrin...isn't actually sure if 'fully understanding Cheliax's culture' is a solution to as many problems as her emotions think it is, though, or if she just has some motivated reasoning to conclude that because she really really really really hates social awkwardness. 

Anyway. Priority list for problems that she should be directly working on, or knowledge from dath ilan that she should be trying to convey: actually still really unclear! 

Also Merrin is already feeling very tired and slightly despairing and sort of wants a nap, less because she's sleepy and more because she desperately wants a break from having thoughts. Ideally a fun break but she can't have everything. 

- really, Merrin's brain?

On reflection she should have flagged that sooner. Maybe when Antonio advised her to be careful about rushing headlong into solving problems, except that the way he said it was really nonspecific and also didn't land quite right with her. (She feels a little bad about being irritated with him, now.) 

But: it's not so much a matter of 'why shouldn't she have fun', it's that - she's in a legitimately terrifying situation with a whole lot of potential for things to go wrong that she didn't see coming, and also likely full of things she's going to find upsetting, and she's already having to put significant mental discipline into not freaking out. She can't maintain that indefinitely without having any leisure activities. This is a very predictable basic fact about Merrins.

The thing she needs to stay on an even emotional keel about all this isn't even rest, so much. If she wants to be at her best when she's working then she needs downtime, when she isn't responsible for tracking all the things that could go wrong all the time, and can have fun. 

Normally she would see her friends and play games, or have a girls' night and talk about their romantic lives, or plan a date with one of her boyfriends. She doesn't have those specific options here but...presumably...people in this world take breaks and have social lives and do leisure activities just for fun? She can get to know some people. Maybe some of the wizard students; they're younger than her, but that's fine, it's not like she has colleagues here yet. The language thing is awkward but they can understand her, and probably in a day with heavy use of flash cards she can learn to recognize a few dozen phrases in Taldane. (Merrin is basing this off her previous rate for learning new medical terms; it should if anything be easier if it's not a new concept, but she's never tried to pick up a conlang so she isn't sure how long that would take her.) Probably there are leisure activities in Cheliax that aren't as language-dependent, maybe something more athletics-based? Do people go swimming for fun? 

This is a next-couple-days priority, not a literally-top-of-her-list priority, but Merrin writes it down and adds it to her summarized list of topic-handles to bring up with Antonio or whoever talks to her next. (She feels only a very tiny amount of unendorsed self-consciousness about asking senior important Governance officials for help arranging her a social life. It's obviously in their interest to arrange a maximally functional Merrin.) 

...In the meantime, she doesn't feel quite ready to dive back into either Priority Reassessment or Anticipating Horrible Unintended consequences, so she will take a break for a few minutes, flop in the chair, nibble some fruit, and enjoy a quite pleasant and detailed fantasy about the date that she should be having right now, if not for an unlikely disaster with a plane. 

Antonio Agramunt has by now cast his own Detect Thoughts and seen how Merrin's thoughts on multiple occasions have gone terrifyingly precise and organized and directed by multiple concepts he doesn't understand, which the 7th-circle confirms he doesn't understand either, in order to arrive at systematic lists of questions about Lawful Good Cheliax, whose answers Merrin is clearly planning to relate to other unknown principles.  Which places Cheliax very much in the position of an illiterate village guilty of tax evasion that needs to suddenly make up consistent stories that can fool a literate tax collector.  One with a lot of accounting knowledge and experience in the big city, who doesn't know very much yet about how farms work, who doesn't particularly expect the tax evasion yet, but who is already drawing up organized lists of questions to ask.

Antonio tells the 7th-circle Security to relay upwards that Agramunt doesn't think he's competent to pull this off, Agramunt doesn't think his immediate superiors in the diplomatic corps are competent to pull this off either, Agramunt is not sure who is competent to pull this off but they need crazy stats and serious education, and whoever is taking over this operation might need to take over fast.

It's a slightly better look on his career record than just asking to be relieved himself, if he's right.

Merrin spends somewhat longer than she had intended fantasizing about volcano lair dates, which is...probably actually an indication that she's more mentally tired and overwhelmed than she had realized, and should probably not make any decisions until she's slept, unless they seem really incredibly overdetermined and also genuinely urgent. She should probably have a high bar for considering something 'genuinely urgent' though; even if she finds out about something that would be an immediate-response-with-a-significant-fraction-of-Civilization's-resources scale problem in dath ilan, most problems here will be long-term and would have continued to be if she hadn't arrived and also UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES. 

(Anyone trained in Exception Handling is used to some amount of 'having to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, including uncertainty about the number and scale and importance of the unknown unknowns'. Anyone trained in Exception Handling also, generally, has quite a lot of reasons to hate doing this. To Merrin, it's always felt a bit like the metaphorical equivalent of balancing on a narrow wobbly bridge of uncertain structural integrity over a very deep pit, and it might be easier and less stressful to do this by avoiding looking down but that's a great way to miss all the warning signs that one is about to do something superficially clever yet really, really stupid in context. Merrin has been in training scenarios where she did things that were really stupid in context. It was embarrassing, which given who she is as a person was possibly more motivating than the actual simulated consequences. Freezing up and refusing to take actions would also be easier. Balancing on a metaphorical tightrope and looking down and trying to juggle a thousand different uncertainties, and deciding which of them she can ignore in order to simplify her reasoning enough to make any decisions at all, is the hardest possible way to do this. It's probably a lot easier if you're smart enough to be a Keeper but Merrin isn't even sure, maybe you just end up tracking ten or a hundred times as many complexities and it feels exactly like this.) 

She will write down some thing that she might want to decide to do later once she has any idea how to prioritize, and then that's probably all the organizing-her-thoughts she's actually up for in a single session. Merrin isn't sure she's ever spend this long trying this hard just to understand a confusing situation. Generally emergency response medicine does not actually give you time to do that. Which, Merrin is starting to conclude, possibly made her job EASIER because wow this is exhausting. 

Things she might want to do, in the medium term: 

- Show Cheliax how to build some specific technology. 

- Attempt to teach some of them whatever concepts are taught in dath ilani schools even to someone a standard deviation below median intelligence, if they don't have those as part of their schooling here. 

- Start a research project with one of their magical healers to see if there's a fruitful way to combine the two areas into super-medicine. (She sort of hopes it's that one. It would be really fun.) 

- Talk...to a god...? (Does NOT sound fun.) 

There is no way that's a complete list but she has time to add to it as she thinks of other options. She needs to get answers to a very long list of questions before she's going to feel ready to pick which item to put first, anyway. (Presumably in the end she's going to just ask their top Governance leaders what they think is most valuable, but she needs to be sure she can explain all the considerations first, and then also be tracking whether they're about to fall into one of the unintended consequences pits that she really needs to dig around in her memory to list more of.) 

Merrin takes another ten minutes just to close her eyes and picture relaxing scenes of sunsets and nature, which is the best way she knows to quickly reset her verbal-processing-loop, and then she gets up, sorts her now-rather-thick bundle of notes with the questions to ask and the translation-troubleshooting-ideas on top, and ducks out into the hall to inform Antonio or whoever she happens to see first that she's actually done organizing her thoughts now. 

Antonio turns aside from the conversation he's having with -

- a woman who has horns growing out of her skull, curving in to bracket her face; who has yellow eyes with slitted pupils clearly visible below her fancy forehead-wear; who aside from that is pretty enough that no reasonable amount of faceblanding could possibly let her walk around in public without her being a standards-escalating attractiveness infohazard; and who's dressed in a way that doesn't make her even slightly less hazardous -

- to inform Merrin seriously that this is Albe, a much more powerful economicmagic-user than himself, who's going to confirm that instant-movement economicmagic does in fact work on Merrin, and then try a few other things to see if they can figure out what's going on there.  Albe is a trusted highly-paid-Security-cleared-consultant-with-considerable-autonomy-and-authority (three syllables in Baseline) for Governance, and she has hopefully been successfully instructed not to be too sociallyweird at Merrin who just got here from another causal-continuum.

Antonio probably will not end up permanently in charge of Merrin's case.  He was just the person on duty in the negotiating-with-other-factions section of Governance when Merrin showed up, and it's been confirmed that this ought to escalate higher.  Antonio is however for now charged with setting up Merrin's immediate living quarters, and arrangements for anything else Merrin needs or wants tonight or the next morning.  Any requests there?

Wow. Okay. Merrin is not even very susceptible to the attractiveness kind of infohazard and is mostly asexual and that's still distracting. The horns do not really detract from the effect. It's so doompunk. 

Merrin introduces herself to Albe as politely and professionally as she can manage, though if Albe needed to be instructed not to be sociallyweird at her then really Merrin wishes Antonio would have taken her aside and warned her and told her how to not be sociallyweird back! 

"I'm not that fussy about living quarters?" she says to Antonio. "I mean, all else equal I sleep best in a cold room with heavy blankets, but it's fine if that isn't readily available here. ...I did have the thought, since we last spoke, that something I usually need in order to function at my best is - some off-work leisure time with friends - and it seems especially important that I'm at my best during my work time, given the high stakes here. I don't actually know what it does to my psychology if I don't have a social life and fun downtime. But obviously I don't actually have friends here yet. I would probably enjoy seeing the wizard students I met again, um, if they...were interested in that." She should not assume they want to befriend her or accidentally pressure anyone that would be rude. "Otherwise, um - what do people in Cheliax of around my age usually do for fun and to meet people?" 

"If your world is truly as sophisticated and advanced past Golarion as it's been suggested to me," Albe says in Baseline, speaking noticeably faster than Antonio does, not quite at the speed of Merrin's boyfriends talking to their intellectual peers, "I would expect you to find all of Egorian's entertainments to be paltry things.  The poor folk of Cheliax are among the wealthiest in the world, and their wealthy folk among the poorest; you will find no symphonies or plays on offer in this palace, I fear, at least not tonight, and I am probably better in bed myself than any sex-worker who would prowl this place rather than somewhere wealthier.  I suppose they might have a selection of books, two-dimensional-gameboard games, and economicmagic-users discussing finer points of mathematics.  Perhaps if instant-travel magic works on you I could take you to Absalom -"

"That sounds like a terrible idea pending a lot of Security review."

"- some other evening, I was about to say, Agramunt!"

What? Literally what about what she just said made Albe assume she was angling to hire a sex worker– okay fine that would be a halfway reasonable assumption for a lot of people, who are not Merrin, but that's based on information that Merrin hasn't actually given them. 

- it occurs to her belatedly, five seconds later, that that might be flirting in which case ????????!!!!!! how is she even supposed to respond. This is a trusted highly-paid-Security-cleared-consultant-with-considerable-autonomy-and-authority and Merrin was therefore expecting the interaction to go a particular way and this is NOT IT. She will respond by ignoring it. That seems least likely to cause a diplomatic incident or something. 

"...Yeah, I mean, I wasn't really expecting Cheliax to have movies or games nearly as sophisticated as dath ilan, I'm - I can't say I'm zero upset about it but it's not my top worry and probably wouldn't make top ten. I...don't normally think of myself as someone who would desperately miss hanging out with people and talking about the finer points of math but I sort of can't avoid it in dath ilan, maybe I would miss it if it stopped being everywhere all the time. I...think I can actually manage fine without the quality of fiction or games I'm used to as long as I have people to do things with, it just occurred to me that I might need to put some actual thought into meeting people socially." 

"We will not lack for people who'd wish to meet a traveler from another world - though it may take some work upon our parts to find those who would not bore you.  Contrary to what Albe seems to think, there are parties from time to time in the palace in Egorian; we could have one of those to welcome you here.  With a professional-musician."

Elaborate sigh.

Merrin manages not to say 'but I get along with basically everyone, I'm not worried they'll bore me' because she is, instead, noticing that this is confusing, and then piecing it together with the other confusing part where Antonio doesn't come across as sounding nearly as intelligent as one would expect from a high-level Governance official and...oof she doesn't like that implication at all. 

Why is Albe sighing?? Was she hoping to be the one to personally make friends with Merrin and introduce Merrin to her friend-group socially? In that case Merrin - is not actually going to feel bad about security considerations. Though she should ask what the considerations are, if 'Absalom' is dangerous or something that seems important to know - it'd be weird for it to be both unusually dangerous and also a default destination for higher-quality entertainment, that implies things that Merrin doesn't love about the overall safety level of this planet. Great. Also some things about how seriously they're taking Merrin's personal safety, but - no, that isn't actually surprising now that she thinks about it, obviously she is going to be very important to the Governance of Cheliax.  

"Sorry," she says to Albe, not wanting to outright reject the possible overture of friendship. "Anyway, I think I've said all I wanted on that, and I'm not actually going to fall apart if I go a couple of days before I start making local friends. Um, another thing I wanted to say is that if it turns out we keep having problems with the translation-magic and Baseline, and also the translation-magic can't be applied to me, I should probably get language tutoring so I can just learn your language the normal way as fast as possible."

She will not apologize for 'as fast as possible' being not that fast, it's not as though they have a lineup of other dath ilanis to compare to, and if her deeply uncomfortable inference is right then she'll actually come out looking pretty good relative to their expectations. 

"- but first it probably makes sense to do more testing on the anti-magical effect, which I think Albe was about to do before I interrupted you with requests about my social life." 

"Indeed," Albe says, now sounding fully professional about that.

"I'll note to my managers the part about tutoring.  Meanwhile I expect we can scrape up some items that grant translation-economicmagic, and pass those around at the party from hand to hand so that people can speak to you."

Albe is already heading out in the same direction Merrin entered from; she beckons Merrin to follow.

Oh good. Merrin can gracefully handle 'professional'. Or at least behave in a way that feels smooth and comfortable to her and hopefully doesn't cause terrible offense to the locals. She follows. 

(It's not that she would...mind, exactly, if the infohazardously beautiful, possibly nonhuman or partly-nonhuman, highly-paid-Security-cleared-consultant-with-considerable-autonomy-and-authority with incredibly doompunk horns were flirting with her? It's more that Merrin is already wandering around in an entirely different Civilization, missing huge swathes of context, and aware that the translation magic they're using doesn't work perfectly. Flirting is likely to be especially high-context-culturally-dependent, and actually she thinks 'flirting-related misunderstandings with aliens' might be literally a recurring trope in a certain genre of fiction. Which is one thing if you're an author going for entertaining elaborate shenanigans, but Merrin is instead aiming for not causing avoidable problems. Besides, for all she knows that was not flirting at all and might not even have been an attempt at befriending, and was instead a result of whatever instructions Antonio gave Albe to avoid socialweirdness not being sufficient.) 

(Also she does actually want to understand what's going on with her bizarre anti-magical effect, and after that she has several pages of questions to ask. She may have requested help setting up leisure time later but for now this is still work time.) 

She's really curious what the other tests are going to be, after the instant-movement one. 

....And now that she's a little less distracted by surprise ambiguous-maybe-flirting, Merrin is replaying the recent conversation a bit and noticing some confusion at "the poor folk of Cheliax are among the wealthiest in the world, and their wealthy folk among the poorest". 

Merrin thinks this is a really confusing way to phrase the concept that it seems like Albe was trying to convey? Though Merrin is obviously trying not to be annoyed about it, she's talking to an alien, maybe a literal nonhuman alien not just a human from a causally-separate Civilization. If she's parsing it right - and she thinks it is - then that means that...countries in this world have a significant spread in terms of their shape-of-wealth-distribution? (If she's not and the translation is misleading then maybe Albe meant the literal opposite?) 

....That's weird? It makes sense to Merrin that having economicmagic at all would affect that dynamic - not that she could say how, yet, but once she knows more about both the rarity/cost/difficulty of their magic and also the key roles it plays in their economy, she could at least make some guesses? But that doesn't explain Cheliax being different from everywhere else, so that has to be something else?  

So it's - cultural factors, probably. Or some sort of weird first-mover effect in a world that doesn't have enough global liquidity or efficient global supply chains for that to quickly reach a stable equilibrium (or else she's in a very specific period in history where it will eventually but hasn't yet?)

Or....something to do with gods? That being one of the obvious other major differences, and one that she understands even less than their economicmagic. Maybe it's something that Asmodeus cares about? Or something that 'Lawful Good' in general cares about, or some downstream effect of a different thing they care about.... 

Albe, moving as if in a mild hurry, conducts Merrin back to the platform on which she arrived.

"Testing instant-travel economicmagic," she says.  She takes Merrin's hand in her own -

And vanishes.

Merrin is left behind.

.......Does that mean it doesn't work?

Merrin is pretty sure it worked the first time???

She is now even more confused now! She starts trying to think of possible explanations but she isn't sure where to start - 

Albe is back.

"Now that is unexpected and incredibly interesting.  I'd guess that either you have some subdeliberate control of an innate resistance that you mentally switched on after being instant-moved, and can't yet perceive within yourself to switch off, or, for some reason, an external anti-economicmagical phenomenon around you only appeared or was activated after the first time an economicmagic was cast on you."

"Let's get you to a serious workroom, there's experiments to run and research to be done."

Merrin's half-finished thoughts grind to a halt. 

"- Yeah, I wasn't expecting it either. I don't– I guess either of those makes sense, if I had subdeliberate control I wouldn't know I did. Um. I agree that doing more research makes sense and I also want to understand what the flaming nuclear shit but - what's a 'workroom' and are there safety precautions you should brief me on before I go in one?" Any kind of actual serious research laboratory in dath ilan would have a set of written safety protocols and generally also a required safety training. 

She beckons Merrin to follow her as she again strides off.

"You are looking very immune to economicmagic, and are safe for that reason.  I am not easy to injure, and if I am injured I can be healed.  But we are about to try a number of things with a greater-than-usual possibility of disrupting interestingly, as pieces of their structure get canceled by you in a potentially unbalanced way.  As such we should be in a place that can withstand minor accidents without expensive repairs being required.  That is a 'workroom'."

"I cannot think of any safety-precautions that would be meaningful to you.  Aside from common sense, I suppose; if I seem to be in the middle of building something invisible and complicated, don't start poking at my invisible structure while I'm in the middle of building it."

Since Merrin by definition won't be able to see an invisible complicated structure...

"If you look like you're trying to concentrate, I won't be distracting." That much is common sense. Probably there are some elements that aren't common sense to her and that Albe isn't thinking to specify, but - she will just hold very still against a wall or something and probably nothing will explode horribly? Since Albe is clearly experienced at this economicmagic research thing.  

"Let's go do that, then." 

They don't seem to bump into many people as Albe hurries them through the hallways, including going up three flights of stairs.  A few men and women in doompunk clothing of various quality levels respectfully move out of Albe's way as she goes past.

Albe carefully knocks at a rather impressive doompunk-looking door, and after a suitable pause, opens the door and pokes her head in.

A few moments later she gestures at Merrin to follow her inside.

Merrin is trying to mentally note as much as she can about her environment! Mostly she is noting so much doompunk, which is - wow, this country (or palace, at least) has really gone all-in on a coherent aesthetic? She tries to make eye contact with the people they pass, in hopes of recognizing their faces later, but it's not as though she has much context on who they are even if she manages that. 

- is the serious research laboratory also doompunk on the inside? 

Sort of?  It's definitely rather mystical-looking.  The room's apparent walls are murky darkness, except for the wall into which the door was set, and the floor and ceiling stretching between those walls are coated with some yellowish metal, as is the door-wall.  Neatly arranged spots on the ceiling shine with Sun-colored brilliance, a respectable amount of indoor lighting even by Civilization's standards.

"Oh, don't touch the wall-fields, please," Albe says as they enter.  "They're magical dampeners that are themselves magic, and I'd rather you not cancel those."

See! This is exactly the kind of safety precaution that Merrin, who does not want to cause any problems, would have liked to have been briefed on in advance before she walked in here! 

She is going to look with great curiosity at everything, not that she really knows how to make sense of it yet. Merrin isn't a small child and can look at things without ending up accidentally touching them, but it still seems - better - to avoid the possibility that she'll shift her weight and accidentally break some sort of critical containment system. 

"....Thank you for telling me. Um, is there a spot where I can just sit down and hold perfectly still and definitely not break anything?" 

"Center of the floor is fine.  Let's start with the obvious, see if I can directly cancel an effect on you.  It won't work, wouldn't even work on a regular anti-economagical field, but let's try anyways."

Albe extends a hand toward the murky walls of darkness, takes the arm-length cylinder of polished metal that smoothly extrudes from it that dark wall, and then gestures at Merrin with her other hand, the one not holding the metal.

"Failure as expected," says Albe.

The metal cylinder floats back into the wall, replaced soon after by a thin cylinder of polished wood.

"All right, let's try the elemental energies in order.  This one is what we'd term Positive Energy.  Try poking it with the tip of your little finger first, it's relatively not dangerous but good practice for when we try the more dangerous energies."

There's a sphere of blazing pure white light within easy finger-poking reach of Merrin.

Merrin looks at it. Somewhat dubiously. 

".....I would maybe feel more comfortable if you defined what you mean by relatively not dangerous. Since, um, healing magic might not work on me, if anything bad happens, and I was firmly instructed to try not to have any medical emergencies." 

"This is the raw form of the energy that underlies healing spells.  Unshaped, drawing a small amount of it into yourself would simply invigorate you."

"The effect is not long-lasting; do please proceed."

Was she just supposed to know that? It's not like anybody TOLD her - maybe they assumed the translation-magic would cover it but Merrin feels like it has been thoroughly demonstrated that this is a questionable assumption and also, in fact, it didn't. For all she knew 'positive energy' could translate to something like 'antimatter'. 

...Merrin is trying not to judge Albe about this, since it sounds like she was hauled in for an urgent situation and did not have much time to receive a handover, but she is still kind of judging this entire world's safety protocols. 

(There is a brief and mostly invisible-even-to-Merrin emotional tug of war between her deeply-instilled desire to be really actually sure that she has personally read and understood all of the hazards in a research environment, and the even deeper and more instinctive desire to avoid conflict. Merrin is very tired and also Albe is very pretty and 'avoiding conflict' wins.) 

"All right. If you're sure?" And she waits a beat and then pokes the blazing light. 

As soon as the tip of Merrin's pinky contacts it, the sphere starts to shrink, to diminish towards its own center, until the sphere is smaller and she isn't touching it anymore.  It doesn't feel like anything.

"You annihilated the healing energy, rather than it entering you.  Well, that's a pity, and another method of healing excluded..."

"It's unusual for me to try and see things from the perspective of somebody who cannot be healed, who must needs fear injury so.  It seems like it would exclude a number of fun activities in life.  But let me try..."

"Oh, interesting again.  I cannot touch your hair with my economicmagic hand; economicmagic is annihilated by your hair the same as it is annihilated by any other part of you, even though hair is not a living part of you under some important principles of economicmagic.  May I sever a small lock of your hair, to see if the effect persists when it is apart from you?  Either way, we can use your hair to test and touch the more dangerous energies I would try next, if that sets your mind at ease."

Wait is THAT flirting Merrin's brain should shut up. Merrin has things to do. Such as - well, right now her work seems to mainly include studying her mysterious (and equally mysterious to local economicmagic experts, apparently!) anti-magical properties. In a doompunk magic lab. With a distractingly beautiful horned nonhuman. Who keeps looking at her. (Although it's not like Merrin can take that as very much evidence for 'flirting', a fascinated scientist would also be looking at her.) 

...There are conditions under which this would feel appropriate and intriguing for flirting? This is not one of them because this is not downtime. Merrin still has several entire pages of additional questions to ask (at some point, eventually.) 

"Sure. ....Um, just following the principle of caution, I could cut it myself? I know I've cut my own hair and nothing weird happened, but there are still a lot of unknown unknowns in my model of your local reality. It's probably fine but it's cheap for me to do it anyway." 

"I cannot see what you are cautioning against, quite, but if you wish..."

An unusually dangerous-looking knife extrudes from the wall, with an arm-length double-edged blade and hefty solid hilt set with a red-translucent stone at the bottom.  Merrin may not recognize it as a ruby if she's used to clear unclouded synthetics for corundum.

Albe presents it to her, hilt-first, holding it by the blade herself, without apparent trepidation.

That is the most absurdly doompunk piece of...lab equipment?? ...that Merrin has ever seen. In addition, it seems really not ideal for cutting hair, especially when her own hair is short enough that she is not actually going to be able to see what she's doing! Has Cheliax not invented scissors. Even if Cheliax hasn't invented scissors they could give her something reasonably sized? Merrin is suddenly very curious what sorts of magical experiments require an arm-length knife rather than a scalpel-sized one such that this is the equipment easiest at hand. 

She's separately now very curious how the hidden wall-storage-compartment works - it's probably that, and not that the absurdly oversized and pointlessly double-edged-blade knife was spontaneously generated on the spot? Not that she can rule out 'spontaneous generation of unnecessarily doompunk lab equipment' as a thing this world's magic can do! 

Merrin has handled scalpels before, and found this a reasonable amount of stressful the first time and then got used to it, and this isn't different in principle, probably? There's just lot...more...total sharp to be cautious of. Oh, and also it might be magic - which probably doesn't actually matter for Merrin, it seems likely that she would cancel any magical effects it would otherwise have - but it would be pointless incautious not to clarify that.

(....Merrin is slightly starting to feel like maybe this is on purpose and she's being 'trolled'? Maybe Albe wants to see at what point she will actually raise an objection or flag a safety hazard? That...seems like a very fraught thing to try on someone from another world, though, and she has Antonio's assurance that he asked Albe to avoid being socialweird at her which would probably cover that case, and also Merrin herself can't assume any of the usual communication about this would be understood. Maybe Albe would consider it horrifically rude if Merrin falsely accused her of trolling?) 

She doesn't hold out her hand yet. "Um, normally I would ask if there are any safety protocols I should be aware of other than the obvious like 'don't wave it around wildly' but I actually don't want to assume that what's obvious to you will be obvious to me." 

“Don’t stab yourself?  You can’t hurt me with it.”

Okay then. "I will endeavor not to stab myself." Merrin takes the blade by the hilt and, if nothing weird happens when she does, will spend an entire minute just holding it and moving it around trying to get a sense of the weight and balance and how much force she has to exert to move it, before trying to bring it anywhere at all close to her head. 

(She's still really confused. There must be a reason why it made sense from Albe's perspective to hand Merrin an arm-length knife to trim her hair rather than something more practical. Maybe there's a kind of magical effect that can be placed on a blade but only if it's above a certain size? Maybe Albe is from a species with nonhuman psychology and she doesn't native have an urge to avoid danger and so sees no downside? Maybe Cheliax just has no institutional habits around minimizing risk to researchers because everyone goes to afterlives? ...She's reaching here, and probably it's none of those things and it's instead somewhere in the vast space of hypotheses that Merrin cannot possibly single out with the still rather minimal information she has on Cheliax.) 

(She's also faintly embarrassed that she has apparently let herself be socially-pressured into doing something that would not pass muster in any dath ilani research facility, but it's not actually stressing her out especially; Merrin has never had very strong instincts toward avoiding danger to herself.) 

Does the mega-knife seem to be behaving predictably and as-expected for a piece of metal of that length and weight? Merrin is also trying to gauge Albe's reaction to her caution, in case that adds any clarity on WHY THIS. 

“…are you sure you don’t just want me to do this?  I wish I could offer you a scissors, shears, scalpel, razor, or just a smaller blade, but every single one of those here is economagiced.”

"- Oh, is that why. I now feel slightly silly about not having just asked." Merrin thinks for a few moments. "Hmm, I think even operating on the principle of 'something completely random and unexpected could happen because I have no idea how anything works, it seems safer for you to do it. Assuming you have practice handling this thing. ...Though if you do have scissors with economagic effects on them, it seems likely given our observations so far that my holding them would cancel the effect anyway? Not sure if you're worried that they would explode instead or something." 

Everything about this interaction is disorienting and Merrin isn't sure how to attribute this to Albe-related socialweirdness, the enormous undifferentiated pile of cultural differences, or just that she's really antsy to get this done and move on to her several pages of questions to ask. In none of those scenarios is in Albe's fault, though, and Merrin reminds herself that Albe is probably having a similarly confusing and frustrating experience from the other side. (And Albe, who does have a clear understanding of local economicmagic, probably finds Merrin's paranoia about this obnoxious.) 

She tries to very carefully wrangle the megaknife so she can offer it hilt-first the way Albe did when handing it to her. 

Albe takes it from her much more carefully than she offered it, back when Merrin was in control of the taking-motion.

"It's true that we haven't tested your ability to use magical devices, but I am more concerned with the question of what happens if a magical blade is forced to cut through your hair.  That seems like an issue where what I actually want to do is quickly enchant a small needle with an unnoticeably weak enchantment, and use that to poke your toe, so that, if the result is that the enchantment fails disruptively, it is not then right next to your head."

As soon as Albe is holding the blade, looking very much in control of it, she quite gently and slowly brings it close to Merrin's head, where Merrin can at all times see it, and shaves off a small lock from the end of Merrin's hair.

Moments later that lock floats in front of Merrin.

"No longer magic-nullifying.  A pity.  There would be so many uses for hairs that disrupted magic, though it would still be quite the painful trip to transport them to the many places they would be useful, without instant-travel magic."

"...Right. That makes sense. Also hearing you explain your reasoning is around risk analysis here is - helpful. It's just -" the analogy she's using is how careful she would want someone to be in a high-containment-level biology research lab in dath ilan if they knew absolutely nothing about biology and also couldn't read the safety handbook, and she's trying to be that level of careful, but she doesn't feel like explaining it all, "- um, I don't know what to be cautious of, and I am used to working in conditions that are hazardous in some way, so I'm - trying to be as careful as though this room contains every hazard I can think of, since annoying you is a less bad outcome than accidentally seriously injuring myself, sorry. If you explain why you're doing something a certain way, that gives me information about what isn't dangerous as well as what is." 

Watching Albe be visibly careful is also pretty reassuring! Merrin now feels slightly bad about having considered that maybe her species was inherently incapable of taking danger seriously. She's glad she didn't say it out loud. 

"That is disappointing. ...And kind of weird? It's - not like the hair is any more not-alive than when it was attached to my head - does hair conduct magic?" Merrin doesn't even know what that would mean and it might be an incredibly stupid question. "Or does the antimagic effect somehow - have a sense of me-as-an-object, that includes my hair if it's attached to me but not otherwise? ...Oh, a test we could do is if my clothes have the effect while they're on me." 

"I already tested your clothing; it doesn't dispel my magical hand on contact."  A brief light pressure, through Merrin's clothing, on her upper chest.  "Come to think, if you want to avoid all possibility of damaging your clothing, do you possibly want to remove that clothing, or at least the upper portion of it, before we test the interaction of your still-attached hair with other ontologically-simple energies besides Positive?"

IS THIS FLIRTING??????? 

...Flirting in a high-containment-level biology research lab would be a really bad idea and probably their highly-paid-Security-cleared-consultant is not...actually...doing that...? Lesson, probably: interacting with nonhumans who are also from a different Civilization is really confusing. Which Merrin could probably have predicted going in, so it's not a very contentful lesson, but still. 

You know what's ALSO a bad idea: being topless in a high-containment-level biology research lab. Why would you do that. 

"...Sure, but could I borrow a different outfit I care less about damaging?" See, this is what LAB COATS are for. "In case there's a side effect that's, like, non-magical heat release, I would rather my clothes get damaged than me. ....Um, if I'm being paranoid about things that are totally not actually dangerous, you can also just tell me that." 

"Oh, yes, that makes perfect sense," Albe says, not sounding at all disappointed by it.  "There is not nonmagical clothing here, though.  Let me just step outside for a moment and steal somebody else's shirt from them - may I trust that you'll go on staying in the center of the room and not wander off from there, at least not more than a few steps?"

"I will stay in the center of the room and not wander off." It's probably responsible for Albe to double-check this, even though Merrin does not, in fact, need to be told twice to follow a basic safety precaution. "In dath ilan we would have signage to remind visiting non-specialists of things like that, but I'm not actually at risk of forgetting." 

"In Golarion we can recover from mistakes like that and it's not too much of a disaster if somebody forgets.  I hope you're not too offended if I say that it seems you come from a very terrified society, maybe not without reason, but still."

Albe leaves through the only visible door before this can be answered.

Well, yes, the downside of getting a researcher killed is going to be lower if most individuals are less risk-averse due to dying and ending up in an afterlife being a fine outcome for them. And then their Civilization wouldn't have to pay the really absurd salaries that dath ilan does in order to get anyone willing to take on actually-dangerous jobs, which is what provides a strong incentive to make facilities not just safe but legibly, verifiably safe, with a documented history of very low accident rates. Merrin wonders if Cheliax even keeps statistics on accidents. 

'We can recover from mistakes like that' doesn't sound quite like what someone would say about fatal incidents being less intensely desirable-to-avoid because employees wouldn't be too upset about ending up in the afterlife? It's still inconvenient for the organization, presumably. (Though it's any information toward the afterlives being nice. She should ask at some point if people generally know beforehand which one they'll end up in or if the selection only happens later.)

Non-fatal incidents...would be less costly to an organization if you had instantaneous healing magic, and didn't need to cover expensive medical treatment as well as having the researcher off work for a significant length of time? But that still doesn't quite fit with how confidently Albe said that mistakes - period - were recoverable. 

........can you get people back from afterlives? 

Merrin is going to ask Albe this question as soon as she gets back. 

Albe returns, bearing the shirt and pants of, it looks like, some man who worked for Governance.  "He whined a bit but I was able to get his clothes off him in the end," Albe states, and offers the items to Merrin.

Merrin hadn't actually been meaning to deprive some other Governance employee of their clothes that they were wearing for work, she had been assuming there were spares, like at every job she's ever worked! 

If they do actually have magic to get dead people back from afterlives, that...would explain a lot about the general attitude toward safety being very disorienting for Merrin. Even if it was expensive, once they were at the point where the additional safety features required to save one researcher's in expectation would be more expensive than just bringing them back in case of a fatal accident, then the cost-benefit analysis would tilt toward doing that. 

"Um, what was his name? I should apologize to him later. Also, um, before I forget, does your economicmagic let you bring people who die back from their afterlife or am I making a wrong inference somewhere?" 

"I didn't think to get his name, but I paid him.  Yes, we can do that, and I am not sure it would fail for you.  Still, we should not test it."

Albe is still making no visible move to leave the room so Merrin can change.

"I would also really rather not test it! It just makes your entire attitude toward risk-assessment make way more sense. Though I assume," hope, but she's being polite and charitable here, "that you're taking into account if it might not work on me, and being more cautious than you would with a random economicmagic researcher." 

Obvious corollary, which nonetheless only occurs to Merrin about ten seconds later: if people feel less incentive to avoid careless accidents, then...maybe...it's not against the standard policies and also common sense to flirt in a magic research lab???? 

If Merrin doesn't want to be flirted with then she should probably say something explicitly, because not doing that leads down the path of avoidable ridiculous errors that even fictional characters who are supposed to be making mistakes don't make because it wouldn't be believable. 

...Merrin is not sure that she definitely doesn't want to be flirted with? It's mostly just very hard to assess while she's so confused. Partly because, well, she is just definitely less pretty than Albe, who is an outlier on that dimension in the same sense that a mountain is an outlier among pebbles. Maybe she thinks Merrin is interesting because of the antimagical effect, on top of the whole 'being from another Civilization that she clearly finds impressive' bit? 

This is such a romance trope. 

Should she be updating toward yes, the specific world she landed in was selected by some process, and it was the romance hypothesis? Because she wasn't even being serious when she came up with that as an example! 

...On further thought, having an inherent antimagical field effect is ALSO a VERY RECOGNIZABLE TROPE but has the multiverse failed to notice that Merrin is only very dubiously asexual and does that mean she can stop shutting out all magic by learning to fully unlock her sexuality– ....if that is how the reality she now finds herself in works, then Merrin is going to– she doesn't even know what. Have a lot of processing to do? 

They have to do WHAT to shut down the antimagic field.

How would dath ilan even know that would happen, if they don't have magic -

What was that concept for the thing that was supposedly doing it -

"I am trying to take into account your non-repairable nature.  It is possible that, the concept being such a foreign one, I am not trying hard enough.  I haven't been asking you for instruction on how to try harder, because it is in fact something I'd expect you to plainly not know, given your ignorance of all principles of economicmagic."

"It occurs to me, saying as much, that I should also describe in more detail the implications of the test recently performed: a field with that property is more characteristic of something that might be done to you rather than something you are.  If you cut the hair of an intrinsically magical being, it would retain whatever magical properties it had and be useful perhaps in constructing enchanted items.  If I cast a spell to protect myself against ontologically-simple fire, and visited the continuum of ontologically-simple fire, my hair would not burn there; but upon being cut from my head, the severed hairs would burn."

"Since your language does not have any word for 'god', the obvious sort of being who might be causally-responsible here, could not be a sort of potentially causally-responsible force on the dath ilan side of things.  Do you know of anything other than 'gods' which might, from your side of reality, have a reason to do such a thing to you?"

"The meta-level principle that doesn't require any domain knowledge to give as advice would be just, if you're about to do something, stop and spend a minute or five minutes assuming it will go disastrously and listing the possible explanations for how that you can think of, and then making sure you've got precautions against all of those," Merrin says, since this is the easiest question to answer. 

....Yes, in fact, Merrin did just now think of an explanation that would in some sense qualify as being a possibly causally-responsible entity from - she's not sure it would make sense to describe as 'the dath ilan side of things' so much as the, what, broader structure of reality that which both dath ilan and Golarion are embedded within? ...Merrin is not a Keeper and has no idea how to think about that kind of causality, let alone assess whether it's plausible. 

Also, not only does she not know how to explain it in a way that would make sense and not sound utterly ridiculous, it would also be so incredibly awkward. 

- oh, there might be versions of this which are not the Romance Hypotheses, where it would make sense for her to be selected into a world on the basis of having an antimagical field. It could be Plot Relevant in some other form.  

She's also...not...sure...that it would be a causally-responsible force of the kind that one would describe as 'doing a thing' to her? As opposed to, say, selecting a Merrin out of all the possible worlds because dath ilanis - or dath ilanis who happen to be asexual-ish - are inherently antimagical within the ontology of Golarion's magic. ...Also the fact that she's only asexual-ish in the first place seems like - some reason to think the selection process is not 'romance tropes from a very specific dath ilani subgenre of fiction', even if that were a way that things could work, because she doesn't cleanly fit it. 

Merrin has no idea how to reason about this and really doesn't want to be trying to do it while Albe is looking at her and waiting for her answer. 

"I - might have some guesses but it's very complicated and I don't think I fully understand it myself and, um, I don't know how to explain it without either you thinking I'm insane or you ending up believing a thing that is not actually what I meant. I can try to think through what-all the prerequisites are but I can't do that on the spot. So pending that - could a god here have done it? We did notice a change in the behavior, right, it looked like I wasn't initially immune to instant-movement magic but it only worked once, that could be evidence it happened on the Golarion side. ...is it the sort of thing you can just ask Asmodeus? Sorry if that's a stupid or unworkable suggestion, it was on my question-list to ask if communication with gods is possible but I haven't had a chance to go through my list yet." 

After this she should at some point ask about the continuum of ontologically-simple fire because WHAT, but it's rude to overload someone's working memory by asking multiple unrelated questions at once like that.  

"Gods intervene directly in Golarion only very rarely.  This, if it's an intervention - just doesn't seem very much like anything I've heard attributed to any god who's immediately coming to mind, not just in terms of goals, but methods.  I've never heard of a god just slapping a persistent antimagical field on somebody, with no obvious purpose to it, and not, sending anyone a vision telling them to do something.  Gods can most easily act in ways that - reflect their natures - and I cannot think offhand of any god whose nature easily matches to throwing shells of antimagic around people.  If they did that anyways, it would be madly, insanely expensive to them, for an effect as powerful as this one."

"For that matter, I wouldn't expect Asmodeus to be especially happy about some other god doing this in Cheliax without his permission; it is something gods would usually negotiate among themselves first."

"That there is no obvious explanation on Golarion's side is why I asked you sooner rather than later about dath ilan's side, even though you apparently had no magic there."

"It is very expensive for Asmodeus or Heaven to send us information or commands, and they will not do so only for our having asked it.  Else we would have done that at once and earlier."

Things Merrin has just learned about gods, which will hopefully make sense once she has time to think about them: 

- Gods can do interventions in the world, but with various costs. 

- Interventions cost less if they 'reflect' a god's 'nature' whatever that even means. 

- Albe can't think of an obvious candidate god whose nature tends toward applying antimagical effects. 

- Gods can send people visions to give instructions? 

- Humans (and nonhumans, presumably) can request information or instructions (and presumably interventions) but providing this will be costly for the gods in question. 

She should ask Albe for a list of what interventions various gods have been known to do, other than sending 'visions' with instructions, and also she should ask how, exactly, one asks questions of a god. 

(Because she could really use some help over here and if she knows a way to ask for it from beings with 4x as much thinkoomph as her then she might as well try– okay, she should spend somewhat longer considering whether it's a good idea and what unknown horrible downsides it could have, she has to remind herself that even Lawful Good gods are not actually Keepers who she can definitely fully trust. But if it's relatively cheaper for a god to receive a message - which it sounds like it is - then she does want to consider it. Maybe she could ask Asmodeus to warn her off the worst mistakes she could make by trying to act in Golarion uninformed.) 

It's Albe's turn to have her question answered, though. "I can...try to give you the short version of my possible explanation? Um, bearing in mind that it's incredibly weird and I am probably not smart enough or informed enough about the underlying causal structure of reality to fully understand it let alone explain it to someone with none of the background, so I might say something really misleading or it might, in fact, be impossible because things don't work that way. I do notice that I'm feeling really nervous about giving you the short explanation if you intend to take any immediate actions based on it." 

"I'd feel less hesitant about that promise if I could not imagine many, many things you might say that would in fact call for immediate action.  I will at least consult you before rushing off, and be properly hesitant about acting whenever inaction does not lead into imminent emergency and disaster - would that suffice?"

"Fair enough." Merrin wouldn't like it much if someone asked her to commit to that, either, especially if she had a role with significant responsibility and autonomy in a very large and high stakes project on the scale of 'running a country'. 

This seems like a topic that will be especially prone to mistranslation - where Baseline will have words that don't map to existing words in the local language - and also one where there could be particularly undesirable consequences if what Albe hears is different from what Merrin was intending to convey. She feels a lot better about trying this with Albe, actually, rather than Antonio. Albe continues to be impressively quick and careful in her thinking, at least when she's bothering to describe what she's thinking. 

"Okay. So. Reality is - bigger than just Golarion or dath ilan. This is something experts in dath ilan already thought, even when - um, as far as I know - we hadn't actually visited other worlds, it's - something you can infer if you understand math at a deep enough level. Which I don't, I'm - carrying a lot of fragments of things that people smarter than me figured out. Anyway. I was in dath ilan, and now I'm here, and it wasn't as though instant-movement economicmagic moved me between two planets, it was weirder than that, I - died, I'm pretty sure I remember dying insofar as that's even an experience. So - something I know for sure is that somehow, in the whole thing that reality is, it - ended up being the result of some causal process, that I'm here now, because it has to be, math and - reality being made of math - are deeper than what we can directly interact with in Golarion, or what I interacted with in dath ilan. ...That still leaves a lot of variables unspecified, though. It could be random, that I'm here, but it could also be not-random - that there was some kind of - not an intelligent mind in the sense that humans are, but a something, that selected me and selected Golarion and put me here based on the combination meeting certain criteria. ...Does that make sense at all so far?" 

"Dath ilan already knows that the multiverse is much larger than they can see from dath ilan, to the point where they already suspected it might contain something like Golarion.  Something from that greater multiverse moved you from dath ilan to Golarion and you don't know what.  Correct me if required."

"- Seems about right. Thank you for confirming." 

Great. Okay. That was the part that sounds reasonable. The next part is... 

"So, um, this isn't actually something I know and the evidence I have toward either side is really circumstantial but - let's take just the scenario where I'm here because of a process that had a goal and picked Golarion as a destination because a Merrin, in Golarion, would - do certain things that achieved certain parameters? It could be all sorts of goals, and a lot of the possible goals that optimizing entities in the larger Reality could have aren't...going to be things you or I can understand. But some of them might be. One kind could be - the sort of goal that would make sense for the Governance of a country to have? So I considered whether I could have been sent here so that I could fix medicine - the obvious conclusion given my actual specialty and training, but contradicted by Golarion already having healing magic and also afterlives - and that also doesn't at all explain the antimagical effect." 

Pause. 

"...Next bit is where I start to feel especially uncertain either that my on-the-spot theorizing is actually coherent or possible, or that I can explain it in a way that," won't sound stupid, "...that gets past the translation issues. But it's also working up to the one actual specific hypothesis I have that would, maybe, sort of explain the antimagical effect. So - a kind of goal that hypothetical entities could have is to - direct Reality so it includes certain kinds of - what we from our angle would call stories, I guess? It sounds like Golarion also has fiction so I can assume that translates, I hope. Anyway, fictional stories can have a particular shape of plot element that you see in a lot of different stories? Say, you have investor stories where the brilliant young investor sees some exploitable inefficiency in the economy just before anyone else does and makes huge quantities of money off it and then - I don't know, seduces the girl he has a crush on or builds a personal underground mansion-base on the Moon or something. And, um, hypothetically if you were a character in such a story, sometimes the stories also contain fiction as part of the worldbuilding, so you might recognize a pattern and say 'oh, yes, he's making a fortune, I can predict either seduction or a Moonbase mansion might be in coming in the future'. .....Does that make sense at all?" 

"I believe so.  You are saying that they build something like novels, only with us as our materials for them, rather than words on pages.  But that which they construct, is in some manner known to you, perhaps from it being seen within dath ilan, and so you also recognize it here."

"...Yes, that's what I was describing. As one possibility - I'm wildly guessing here and I'm really unsure how to assess relative likelihoods. - Note, I don't think the phenomenon would only happen in ways that I could recognize it? I mean, even if it were based on fiction in dath ilan, I haven't read most of the fiction in dath ilan, there's a lot. So there's a range of possibilities where the underlying causality is - story-based - but I can't recognize it and neither can anyone else here and so it's indistinguishable from the 'random' case or - I guess might just merge into a non-story-trope standard causality based goal..." 

Pause. 

"- Anyway. Assuming that it is based on a story-pattern that I know and could recognize from dath ilan - which, again, is a subset-of-a-subset of the options here - there are a number of different story-patterns that I was...considering. And then looking for evidence of." 

Pause. 

This is the part at which she would mention the romance-trope but - actually - Merrin isn't sure she can say anything about that without it inevitably leading into the part which she should NOT talk about??? 

- oh right, she can just - try saying that. Explicit communication is both a generally good principle when interacting with aliens and has also seemed to work out well before with her and Albe? 

"There's a fact about me that could, in a certain story-pattern, explain the antimagic field, but it relates to an infohazard." 

"I'm - not quite sure 'infohazard' is translating right?"

....Huh. 

"- Can you try to repeat back to me what it's translating as? If that seems really off then I can - do my best to explain it to you as though you were a five-year-old - to be clear I am super not thinking of you like a five-year-old in general but that's one of the mental-attitude workarounds I hoped might help with the translation-magic problem." 

(Except in dath ilan even a five-year-old would know what an 'infohazard' was and Merrin isn't sure how to go simpler than that!) 

"It sounds vaguely like economagical writing that explodes in the face of the first person who reads it."

Merrin spends several seconds attempting to parse that. 

"I - wait - is it a thing in Golarion that you can have - words written on paper - and if it's the right sequence of words then it explodes when someone reads it? Or is it magical paper or magical ink or something?"

Pause. 

"....I guess that's not the worst analogy either way but infohazards are generally - a lot more abstract than that?" 

"Yes, we have a variety of magics like that."

"'Infohazard' sounds like it explodes in the mind of somebody who - knows it?  Thinks it?  There are powerful entities like that in Golarion, beings where simply knowing about their existence can enable them to touch your dreams and drive you slowly insane and into their employment.  All of the ones known to me are dead, obviously, since otherwise it wouldn't be safe for me to know about them.  I'm not clear on how something like that could exist in a world without magic."

"....That's a more central example, I think?"

Also: aaaaaaaaaaaaaah???? 

"- Dath ilan as far as I know does not literally have powerful god-analogous entities where knowing about their existence drives you insane, but - I mean, I wouldn't know. That's - the entire point of having the concept of infohazards, right? And - processes to contain them to various degrees depending on the level of danger - if dath ilan did have entities like that nobody would tell me and that's why I'm not insane."

Pause.

"- The infohazard I was mentioning about me would - probably be less intensely contained than, um, something analogous to a god where knowing about their existence drives people insane. But I - don't have any way of comparing the ranking of infohazards in dath ilan to how thinks work here, so it seems like I'd better be cautious." 

Another pause. 

"....I would feel more comfortable trying to ask a god here about it. If they have four times as much thinkoomph as me then it seems much less likely I could - accidentally break something." 

"Noted.  Perhaps a sufficiently old and powerful angel would serve the same; I believe Chelish Governance does have one or two on staff."

"I trust you know about this matter and are tracking how it would relate to other matters here, if we are not to know of it?"

Would Merrin please think about why in the Abyss anybody would consider the topic of masochism to be in any way like Things from beyond the Great Beyond?  She's thinking it's dangerous to know about but she's not thinking why.

Merrin's thoughts have - some content - but it is not exactly answering those questions. She is mostly going over fragmentary and not-especially-informative memory-replays of the super awkward conversation she had with that Keeper that one time. And then vaguely mulling on how it still feels weird that in dath ilan she, apparently, had this trait that was rare and resulted in MONEY and COOL BOYFRIENDS and this would feel very fake except for how it just straight-up happened. 

"Yes, I - am tracking the considerations I know. Which includes everything I could tell you about." If she could spend literally five minutes talking to an actual Keeper then she would have so much of a better understanding of how risky this actually was! 

"'Angel' isn't translating clearly to me? By context I'm inferring they are - very very senior Governance officials, who have close working relationships with Asmodeus or other gods? Anyway yes if it's possible to arrange for one of them to talk to me that would be really helpful, I'm sure." 

- Merrin's verbal-loop processing is operating on a bit of a delay right now due to ALL OF THE EVERYTHING and so this is the point at which she catches up to– 

"- sorry wait gods can die? How does that happen? How many of them have - died - and how - do they have afterlives too -?" 

"Angels are beings of Heaven that enter into Golarion for a time."

"I... don't believe the gods have afterlives, no.  There are not many gods in the first place; I doubt that more than ten or a hundred have ever died."

Would this person STOP BEING SUCH A RIDICULOUS PALADIN, actually no, she takes that back, that's speaking too much ill of paladins, even paladins don't go charging off to save Great Old Ones.

"Shall we possibly continue the testing of your immunity with respect to the other elemental energies, rather than delaying that, while we talk?"

Okay but that wasn't an answer to her question  ...it seems like probably Albe doesn't know to within an entire order of magnitude? Which - says some things, about Golarion's general ability to collect and analyze data on literally anything, since - Merrin would assume - it's especially hard to miss if an entire god dies? 

She is trying really hard not to develop a whole lot of pointless negative affect about the lack of available data - she could survive without prediction markets, she doesn't love it but she can and she even has training in working with the computers being down, but - you don't need computers to keep notes and records, Golarion has paper.... 

Okay so let's assume 100 gods dead over all of Golarion's history is an upper bound (not that Merrin is even slightly taking that for granted if they're this bad at tracking measurable information) - and let's say the median god has 3.5x as much thinkoomph as the median human, she's totally making that up but - 

- one of Merrin's boyfriends, who is a remarkably sweet and lovely human being and it's impressive that he can nonetheless manage to hurt her as satisfyingly as he does, would have a model of how to compare the moral tragedy of a god-death to a human death, under those assumptions. Or, no, actually he would have eight different models and several dozen spreadsheets and he would spend multiple hours explaining all the intricacies, and, and– 

Merrin has no idea what the conclusion would be, except that she misses him and she misses home and she should focus now. 

Blink blink. "Yes, sorry, that's a good plan." What are they testing again. Merrin was distracted having feelings. 

"Had you, possibly, wished to change your clothing before continuing with those trials, as applied to your hair."

"- Yes, right." Some poor Governance official was convinced or perhaps mildly socially pressured to sell his clothes so that Merrin can wear them and not risk her one (1) dath-ilan-manufactured outfit. It's not as though it's a special outfit, or one she was incredibly attached to - her actual date outfit was in her carry-on, due to not being appropriate to wear on a plane - but probably the clothing available here is far lower quality and also literally all of the high-quality clothing she's seen is incredibly doompunk. Which is, like, fine, but not Merrin's preferred all-the-time vibe. 

Flirting is the last thing on Merrin's mind; she's too busy processing the fact that DEAD GODS and also being homesick. She strips off her top and puts on the borrowed one without any attempts toward modesty. 

This woman might be something of a project.  After some reflection on probable outcomes, Albe mostly acts like nothing interesting is happening at the moment.

Once Merrin finishes changing clothes, Albe summons a sphere of Elemental Fire, and lifts (gently) a lock of Merrin's hair to wave it through, if Merrin doesn't stop her.

This isn't completely non-stressful but Merrin is, in fact, a lot less stressed about economicmagic-research-lab safety now that she feels that she and Albe are actually on the same page about this. She watches the sphere of fire with somewhat tired curiosity, and remembers that she meant to ask about the whole 'continuum of ontologically-simple fire' thing but decides against interrupting Albe while she's in the middle of something delicate. 

Albe touches the lock of Merrin's hair with her own fingers.  "Warmed, as I expected.  Your hair is immune to the economagical ontologically-simple fire, but is heated as normal by the air that the fire is heating.  You should, if you must cross a room full of magical fire, hold your breath and cross through quickly."

"Huh. Neat. Good to know." 

Maybe gods in Golarion, since when they die it's actually a True Death sort of thing, also...end up in another world? Merrin can't decide if that's reassuring or not. It's at least a step forward from 'being sad', and feels like a good point at which to put a mental pin in that entire line of thought and set it aside for NOT NOW. 

- oh right. Flirting. Was maybe happening. ...Replaying everything that's happened, either flirting was almost certainly happening or Merrin is spectacularly bad at picking up on subtext when interacting with nonhumans from another Civilization. But - probably flirting? Merrin has not actually made a decision on how she feels about that, and also hasn't communicated about it because infohazards. And ALSO she assured Albe that she was tracking all the considerations for the Romance hypothesis. (...Which feels a lot like what she imagines it might feel to be steered into some kind of ridiculous Romance-shenanigans plot, because of course from the inside it would feel like each of her decisions was just following common sense?) 

She - is finding it somewhat thrilling, actually, to imagine flirting back while still in a dangerous magical-research lab, and it being fine because danger, in this world, is so much less real, because all mistakes are recoverable, because you can't break anything permanently that magic can't set right - 

...Except that it's unclear whether it's actually less real, for her, because healing magic doesn't work on her and their bringing-back-dead-people magic might also not work on her and - well, for all she knows the afterlives aren't for her either. And she doesn't want to stop existing, actually, and - she's not especially enthused about randomly ending up in yet another different world, if that's the thing that would happen, she's just started to get to know people here. 

One of those people being Albe, who is infohazardously beautiful and reasonably smart and incredibly doompunk and also seems to like Merrin. She....would actually be pretty sad about missing out on whatever might happen next because she did something careless. Which is just another reason to keep following her common sense and being careful, like she would have been trying to do anyway. 

She smiles at Albe. "What's the next test?" 

Would this woman PLEASE think about what bad thing actually HAPPENS if somebody knows that she is a masochist?  Wait, why is Albe infohazardously beautiful, is this -

- is this actually just about fucking heresy, dangerous thoughts that lead to Lawful-Good fucking heresy, is Merrin fucking kidding her.

"We go on to the other ontologically-simple energies.  I'll run through them faster, there's a fair number of those."

Water, Air, Earth.  Water and Air are uninteresting, the Earth sphere does succeed in repelling Merrin's hair although it crumbles at each touch.

A sphere of deadly-looking darkness, which also cannot touch Merrin's hair.

Then comes a sphere of crackling electricity, if Merrin has anything to say about that. 

If Merrin were aware her thoughts were being read she would be putting more effort into thinking less sloppy thoughts (and also would be intensely self-conscious, and would have so many additional questions) but she is not aware of this.

Merrin isn't worried? It's not more alarming than the the fire, and most of her concern and alarm had nothing to do with visual-scariness; her background prior that a new previously-unknown kind of magic will do something other than vanish or crumble is dropping with each additional instance. 

She's not bored, exactly, it's hard to be actually-bored when you're watching examples of real actual magic, but she's definitely thinking about her list of unanswered questions and wondering how many more tests Albe wants to try. 

"...At some point I do want to get you to explain what 'ontologically-simple energy' means," Merrin says. "What's this one called? And what was the dark one before this one called?" 

"Lightning.  The dark one before this was Negative."

"There are six major continuums in what's called the Inner Sphere of the Multiverse, surrounding us in the Primary Material, though - this is not really a sphere, we are not really at the center, it is not a matter of things arranged in space.  Space exists within continuums, not between them.  But from here you could, with the right magic, move into the continuum of not-really-thereness, that didn't translate, the 'Ethereal', and then into the six Inner 'Planes' of Positive, Negative, Earth, Water, Air, Fire."

"Lightning is a quasi-continuum of the overlap between Air and Positive.  After this I will try energy from the para-continuum of Magma, from the overlap between Fire and Earth.  Energies from all inner and para and quasi continuua collectively comprise the Primary Material continuum that holds Golarion."

Sphere of blazing lava!

Whooooooa that's really cool! Merrin has decided that being, at this point, fairly definitively confirmed to be anti-magical is GREAT because she isn't stressed about the sphere of BLAZING LAVA which is RIGHT THERE and probably no one in dath ilan Civilization has ever gotten to experience this. (And to the extent that someone needs to be worried about safety precautions Just In Case, Merrin is basically just going to leave that to Albe, who of the two of them is the one who actually knows things about economicmagic.) 

"Wow. I have so many questions about - I don't even know where to start - the spatial-mathematical structure of your entire world and what exactly you're doing when you - combine energy from different continuua and how that gets you lava. ...Actually that question might just collapse to 'please tell me everything known in Golarion about your known physical laws and how economicmagic interacts with them' which I realize is an unreasonable ask right this second." 

"You may possibly be overestimating how much we know about - 'physicallaws' is not a word that's translating very well for me.  We know much about how the forces of magic interact within themselves, because that is necessary for wizards to learn to cast spells at all.  The more mundane ontologically-simple energies, and how those combine beyond simply paired interactions to form the whole Prime Material - this is less known."

The blazing lava doesn't burn Merrin's hair, but does repel it on contact like Earth, though it is visible to keen-enough senses that the Magma is also being destroyed by the hair's touch.

"I admit, I'm a little curious about what would happen if you poked the Magma with your little finger, or maybe your little toe just in case."

"- Do you expect it to be different from the hair test? I am also curious and I don't mind trying but I should confirm explicitly that the worst-case if I am inexplicably immune to all magic up until now but not Magma is that I end up with a burnt toe and have to handle it with normal non-magical first aid."

Which sounds pretty inconvenient but - basically fine? ...Oh wait this world doesn't have antibiotics. Maybe less definitely-fine-for-sure? Still deeply unlikely to be life-threatening if she avoids being stupid about it. Merrin cannot actually manage to feel nervous about poking the Magma with her toe. 

"Your hair would have to be immune to the Magma but not your toe, and then at the worst you'd end up with a burn, yes."

"It seems this is the sort of case where I should hold your foot and be the one to do the poking, unless you expect to have sufficiently fine motorcontrol there?"

Is THIS flirting Y/N  No this is science. There...may or may not be background flirting happening and Merrin may or may not be participating in it, she's kind of genuinely unsure there? Which is a weird thing to be unsure of. This entire last half-hour is really messing with Merrin's sense of what is this interaction even. 

"- I confess I have not tried sticking my toe in magma before and I have no idea if I would have sufficiently fine motor control if, um, it continued to be magma rather than disappearing," which is kind of tugging on Merrin's purely internal sense of competitiveness, but while in a dangerous magical research lab is not the time. "Your proposal sounds reasonable." She tugs off her shoe and then shifts around in order to offer her foot. 

Albe will with professional care and gentle firmness guide Merrin's foot over to her little toe poking the Magma, very lightly at first before pulling back.  "Any searing pain?"

(It felt briefly hot, not painfully so.)

"....No? It was - warm. Briefly." 

Albe presses harder on the Magma with Merrin's little toe, dipping it in and then taking it out; the Magma yields when pressed.  "If that didn't hurt, I propose we try waving your whole foot through there, first shallowly and briefly, then deeper, and then, if you like, you can wave your hand through molten lava and watch the lava give way."

"- Sure, I can do that." It sounds satisfying, actually even though it would be MORE satisfying if it hurt, like, at least a bit . "....I'm not sure if you're getting useful observational data from this or just - trying to convince me to be less terrified of hazardous things via repeated exposure of it being fine?" 

"I was thinking it would be fun for you; it sounds like you would not have previous experience with being - able to be naughty, in that particular way, of taunting danger and seeing it unable to punish you.  Just to check, are you currently being punished?"

Albe is guiding Merrin's foot through the lava, first rapidly and shallowly, then more slowly and deeply, her hand very firmly in control of Merrin's foot at all times.

(It feels increasingly hot, not quite painful yet.)

...where 'punishment' is a six-syllable technical term in Baseline referring to the negative element of a payoff matrix that was added to force a particular behavior out of an agent, that some other agent predicted would modify its behavior usefully in response to a payoff matrix like that, even though obviously the correct thing to do there is to predictably not modify your behavior in any way favorable to the other agent.

Well that was definitely on the route of escalating into less plausibly-deniable flirting territory until the last bit. Which is just really baffling. That....has to be a mistranslation? Merrin starts trying to frame the question she should ask to figure out what it's a mistranslation of, and then...stops. 

Wait. 

OKAY WHAT. 

WAIT. 

REALLY? 

...Still doesn't fully clarify the bizarre translation-spell error unless their language is really bad at words for this and the thing she meant was closer to 'actually-serious pain'? 

Merrin is suddenly much much less sure that she can or should just ask to clarify, because flaming-ass infohazard potential that's why. 

You know in hindsight that probably explains some things about Merrin's level of attraction. It wasn't explicit but there's a...vibe. Though probably all the doompunk is contributing too. 

....Does she know??? 

What exactly are you supposed to do if you find yourself in another world and encounter a sadist who you would maybe be interested in further flirting with but also have no way of knowing whether she knows this about herself. Did the Keeper who spoke to her that one time advise her on this? No. No he did not. 

"- Doesn't hurt especially," Merrin manages in a slightly strangled voice while she tries to frantically catch up on several different trains of thought. 

Albe will gently put Merrin's foot back down, and then gesture invitingly to the sphere of blazing lava, whilst she tries to figure out what in the Abyss Merrin could possibly be thinking and what was going ON back in her home plane of existence.

All right, theory:  Merrin had fancy rich boyfriends, because she lived in an apparently Lawful Good world actually ruled by a secret Lawful Evil elite who were the only ones allowed to be sadists.  The rest of the population was not allowed to know masochists existed, because that would imply the existence of sadists, and so the whole thing was labeled heretical; Merrin's priests (without gods? but that's definitely what Keepers sound like? actually on reflection you maybe don't need gods to have priests?) told her that people would be hurt, somehow, if they knew sadists and masochists existed; unless of course she was talking to those secret Lawful Evil elites, who were allowed to know about sadism and masochism under some unknown excuse.

It's clearly visible from Merrin's thoughts that she had absolutely no clue that any of this was going on, or found it at all suspicious that dath ilan's elites enjoyed hurting her and that nobody else was allowed to know this, which is, in its own way, incredibly impressive as a feat of social engineering...

Wait.  This theory does not make sense.  Why would Lawful Evil sadists require masochists?

Were they just... into masochists?

Actually that does make some sense, some sadists would probably be into that happening occasionally.

Sure, sticking her entire hand in the sphere of blazing lava is, one, REALLY COOL, and two, good cover for looking concentrated while she tries to figure out what to DO. 

Is this evidence toward the Romance Tropes hypothesis. It feels like it almost has to be??? Which, you know, does not necessarily drag it all the way to 'actually likely' given how tiny a fraction of total possibilityspace it must have been to start out. Maybe her arrival in Golarion was totally random and she's just all on her own volition flirting with a trusted highly-paid-Security-cleared-consultant-with-considerable-autonomy-and-authority in an intensely doompunk magical research laboratory. For some reason. While trying to figure out why she is personally immune to magic including blazing-spheres-of-lava magic. 

...This is not an answer to the question of whether she should try to explain. 

Can she possibly not know? It seems - hard - to carry out the Albe's side of their interaction for the last several minutes by accident. Maybe Golarion hasn't actually sorted out the concept that Civilization could decide to screen off information that would be harmful for many people's wellbeing if it were broadly known? ...Actually that seems not-unlikely, the word apparently didn't translate well. 

Okay. 

Great. 

So it's...probably safe to say something? 

Merrin would really like to consult someone on that but she can't think of anyone or anything more equivalent to a Keeper than literally Asmodeus and this does not seem like the sort of question where it's actually worth requesting an incredibly costly favor from a god in order to be less confused. 

(Merrin is still not saying anything, and still has her entire hand in the ball of lava and is staring intently at it.) 

The ball is shrinking and Merrin's hand is starting to feel painfully hot.

"Would you like to try putting my own finger in there, to see what happens when somebody who isn't you tries that?"

(It's going to take Merrin a while to notice the heat becoming painful, she's busy THINKING.) 

Eventually it's a level of hot that is noticeably pain and not just heat but is not, really, especially aversive. She blinks at Albe's question. What? No! She does NOT especially want fun playing with a ball of blazing Magma to suddenly include a bonus medical emergency with someone who is not immune to economicmagic! Why would she want that? It would completely ruin the mood!

(A moment later she remembers that healing magic exists, which does sound pretty interesting to watch, but maybe not right this second.) 

....Which is plausibly not a mood she should be letting herself indulge in before she's even dealt with her sheets of unanswered questions, and also on reflection she should definitely not be making any decisions related to explaining infohazards until she's spent some time on her own and not distracted by Albe's face. Or other traits. 

"Um, not really - if you want to help me calibrate, you can just describe to me?" 

"I'm hard to hurt, but Magma would do it to me.  I would probably gasp in pain and squeeze my eyes shut and make some sounds and would need to heal my finger after you took it out of the Magma again.  Are you sure you don't want to?  It sounds like you've never had a chance to do something like that before, in your world, and that seems a little sad."

??????????????????????????????????????

"....I was an emergency medical responder," Merrin says after several blank seconds of internal ???????????. "I've had to do lots of painful things to people," who did not have anywhere near Merrin's own pain tolerance, "and I'm pretty confident that I do not actually enjoy the experience. If I didn't have that personal experience already I guess I'd be less sure of that?" 

Albe seems to be under the assumption that this is a completely universal experience which - what. Probably that is evidence of something. Merrin isn't sure of what - it must say something about the broader culture, Albe is too clever and experienced to just fail to model other people. 

"Just to check for safety, are you sure your hand should still be inside that Magma?"

"...Is it like sunburn and causes more delayed damage that I'll notice at the time? I should check." 

It still doesn't hurt an intolerable amount but now that Merrin stops to think about it, she is...maybe being stubborn and competitive about this, and she should not do that with her hand which she's going to need later. She takes it out of the Magma ball and looks at it, checking for redness or blisters and gauging whether it stops hurting immediately or lingers. 

Her hand looks a bit red.  No visible blisters.

Merrin opens her mouth, stops, closes it, and waits to see what Albe is going to say first. She's really tempted to just straight-up ask 'so were you intending to seduce me in the doompunk laboratory from the moment you met me' but she's not sure if that is a "good" "idea". 

Albe is currently looking visibly sad.

"I admit, I am having some trouble imagining exactly what your world must be like, to produce your attitudes.  I wonder if it is - so far into -"

"This language does not, I think, do a good job of translating the axes of the Outer Sphere, it wants to translate 'Lawful' as ordered and 'Chaotic' as entropy, or 'Good' as working selflessly for society's benefit and 'Evil' as self-desire, and that strikes me as unhelpful to the point where you might want to erase it from your mind and start over.  If you are going to learn 'Taldane', the language of Cheliax, you might as well start with those four words, 'Lawful', 'Chaotic', 'Good', 'Evil', and begin by knowing that Cheliax is Lawful Good."

"I have ancestry on my mother's side derived from beings of the Chaotic Evil continuum, and am myself Lawful Evil with much more pronounced Chaotic tendencies than some of my coworkers would like."

"I wonder if dath ilan is so far towards Lawful Good that it would consider Cheliax Chaotic Evil by comparison.  I am wondering this because you don't seem to have ever heard of some concepts from the Evil side of existence, like pleasure in pain, pleasure in receiving pain, pleasure in inflicting pain, traits which are certainly more common in beings with a directly Evil heritage like mine, but are not unknown in even Neutral humans.  Does your world - have nothing at all, except for Good and Lawful people, within it anywhere?"

"Wait the beings from afterlives can bear children with living humans– sorry, that fills in some gaps I had and is also a digression from what you said, I'll...come back to it. Um. I - I'm now even more confused about the axes here and I think I could use a lot more concrete examples of actions people take and how they would end up categorized. I...wouldn't be shocked if everyone in dath ilan would technically be considered 'Good' and I am more inclined to think everyone would be chunked as Lawful, according to my understanding of the way you mean it I'm probably unusually non-Lawful for dath ilan. I think it makes sense that we're - different, in a systematic way, and that means dath ilan is - going to be really far off in some direction, according to any metrics that are normed for Golarion. Maybe it's that one. If you re-normed it based on the dath ilan median and categorized people using the same axes I think you'd still get significant variance?" 

"I suppose, in a world without healing, everyone who enjoyed receiving pain, would have died, and then - those who enjoyed dealing pain, probably followed.  And maybe Good is all that's left, after that."

Albe seems quite visibly sad about this thought!

"...Huh. That's - a possible explanation for why there aren't very many - people like me, I guess. There are more people who enjoy causing pain, and - probably a lot more who...would, if they ever had reason to think about it, and then they would be unsatisfied, and some would be very deeply unhappy. So Civilization tries to make sure that those people at least aren't actively prompted to consider it. ...And the Keepers do at least somewhat actively look for people like me, because I would not have guessed it was a thing - in relationships with other people, I mean. Someone had to sit me down and tell me. And then I - guess I got to make some people really happy, which is neat, especially for a thing I didn't have to spend ten years training at, I - wasn't expecting there would ever be anything like that." 

It feels like CHEATING but not in the sort of way that bothers Merrin or that she would think to consider bad. It's just - sometimes there are things that work out well. 

She's still not sure what this has to do with 'Good' and 'Evil' and is going to have to push for those concrete examples she requested. 

"Oh, so you are Evil, then.  I did think I was getting that vibe from you."

"But - not at all the type to want to see what happened when you guided my own finger into the Magma?"

"...No, not really. I doubt I have much intrinsic draw to it, and then after spending my entire career in medical work, it's just - hard to associate other people in pain with anything other than that, you know? I...can enjoy fiction or roleplay where people get hurt in, like, a natural disaster or an alien invasion, and then I'm there when they're getting rescued and treated and comforted, which I guess is sort of adjacent to the thing? Though I'm not sure it would be nearly as nice enacting that real life with actual injuries, it - would probably get really tangled up with all my mental habits around actual work and be emotionally confusing and weird." 

Shrug. 

"...I think I'm not quite following how much it's pain that's Evil - in which case, is being a medical provider and, like, placing an IV to save someone's life and causing them some pain also Evil - or is it the...wanting it because it's nice and good and makes you happy? In which case I - don't actually think dath ilan has any shortage of that. If enjoying winning games against other people and winning money off them in bets counts then I can hardly imagine dath ilan having more of it." 

She frowns, watching Albe's expression. "I don't know, I guess my sense is that most people have both? I enjoy people hurting me, especially people I feel close to, but I'm not...living in that part of myself most of the time? It would just be really distracting at work and I don't have the leftover mental bandwidth for it anyway. And even if I didn't have a career that I really love, I - don't think I'd want to be doing that all the time, I'd get bored. ...Incidentally if you want to seduce me, it's going to be way less frustrating once I'm not still considering myself to be 'at work'. I guess the exact balance varies, dath ilanis are less binary about work and downtime than I am, some people spend a lot more total time on leisure - I'm kind of notorious with my friends for working a stupid number of hours - some people are even more like that and as far as I can tell their leisure is just reading other people's math work to take a break from their own. I have one boyfriend who, as far as I can tell, doesn't do anything that is only for fun and not also productive work except for when I see him, like, once a month, and his work is pretty for-the-benefit-of-society-oriented, it's not something he does for the money - a lot of dath ilanis do, and I don't know how your system would categorize that either." 

Albe is having trouble tracking all this even with her rather high (for Golarion) Intelligence; it doesn’t help that she is trying to figure out both how dath ilan appears to Merrin and how it must actually be.

“I think it would feel very different to me to - cut off someone’s poisoned finger before the poison spread, say, and to cut off their finger because I wanted to see how their face changed when they were in pain.  That these two things are at all the same is - something I wouldn’t have expected to hear from someone Evil enough to enjoy pain at all.”

”Compared to most people of Cheliax, I am relatively much more likely to flirt on my job, and also I have a lot more fun on my job and with my life in general than most people in Cheliax.  I’d consider the position that you should carefully separate all the fun out of your terribly important job to be Good generally and dangerously-Lawful Good particularly.  It is again not something I’d expect to hear from a girl naughty enough to enjoy waving her hand around in Magma, and I wonder if I am looking at an Evil woman immersed in Lawful Good to the point of that damaging what she is, what she should be, what she could have been in Golarion.  If I were writing a novel and sending the character of Merrin to Golarion after her death to learn something, it would be that.”

Wait has she TRIED cutting off someone's finger is that just a THING here– ...it would be, wouldn't it. Healing magic. That would be so convenient. Merrin...is not actually sure if she personally would enjoy having her finger cut off - actually she's almost certain she wouldn't "enjoy" it in the moment it was happening, any more than she enjoys, in the moment, having to do actual triage in an actual in-real-life multi-casualty incident. (She's dealt with, like, two of those that really counted. Dath ilan is really good at not having accidents if they can be avoided at any reasonable cost, and 'reasonable' is...a lot, when Civilization has vast resources and people really really don't want to die the True Death.)  

Merrin loves her job. Not in the same way, and obviously there are about thirty different aspects she likes about her job, but it's - not a completely different thing either? There's a glorious simplicity in emergencies, there's that moment where the world is sharp and bright and so real and immediate, and she's not in exactly in control but she's entirely there, and it's a little like falling, like the moment after jumping off a ten-meter diving board, and it's very simple because you can't, actually, un-fall once you've jumped.

A few of her colleagues seemed to recognize that, when she described it. The Keeper she spoke to recognized it. Most people don't; most people, relatedly, are confused and impressed by her career path - and, Merrin suspects, attribute a lot more of it to Good motivations than is actually the case. It's not that she's indifferent to the value she's contributing to Civilization, but she's pretty sure most people, herself included, can't run their entire motivation system on that and end up working as hard for as long as someone of -1SD intelligence to succeed at becoming an endurance paramedic and go on to maintain certifications in, like, half of Exception Handling.

She did it because Merrin at fourteen saw a future and wanted it, was hungry for it, and - she's luckier in a way than almost anyone in dath ilan, right, that there wasn't a tradeoff there, that the thing she wanted most in the world from the moment she knew it was out there to reach for is also something that results in people thinking she's some sort of hero.

It's true that she had to put a huge amount of effort - not always fun effort - and struggle and shaping-herself into - being able to exist and fit in as a member of Civilization, and - maybe it's true that this involves hemming in parts of herself, other ways that she could have been, other people she could have been who would have been happy. But unless Merrin is still completely misunderstanding the axes, that feels like it's far more about Law? 

"Thank you for the advice, it's noted," she says dryly. "I - still think I could assess what you're even saying much better if you give me ten examples each of things that are Good or Evil or Lawful or Chaotic?" 

Corrupting this woman would be trivial if she had Wisdom 10.  At Wisdom 20 it becomes a far more serious problem that you can't reliably solve just by reading somebody's mind, figuring out what parts of themselves didn't fit into their old place in the world, packing up those parts with everything else you want her to be, and telling her that the complete package is what she is and that a person like that gets to have everything she knows she wants.  Reading Merrin's mind gives the further impression that this is not just a woman with WIS 20, this is a woman with WIS 20 who was trained and conditioned by experts with far higher Wisdom than that, and that those trainers might have immunized this Merrin against such simple tactics for breaking her out of her Lawful Good conditioning.  They did an unfortunately good job of keeping her happy.

But she has enough basic information about possible vulnerabilities to work with now, and if at all possible should gain more time to think and plan before taking next steps.

Albe floats another wand through the illusion of dark walls screening off the rest of the workshop from Merrin's sight, and summons Quasi-Elemental Void like a distortion hanging in the air.  She waves Merrin's hair through it, to verify that Void is not the particular elemental vulnerability that so many screens and fields turn out to possess.  "I would expect that if you poked a finger into this, it would feel like somebody sucking very powerfully on your finger, possibly enough to damage it - this is Void, the combination of Air and Negative, which should have already removed all the air inside the sphere of energy, on some theories of Void.  I'd be curious to test it, but I think that we should not."

"With respect to the other topic of conversation, I'm starting to feel the same sense of trepidation about trying to explain the nine alignments to you, that you seemed to feel about explaining to me what forces might have produced the antimagic around you."

Whoooooooa they can just make magical vacuum that's neat. Merrin runs a brief mental search for technologies that she knows become feasible once you can reliably evacuate the air from a container and get a sufficiently hard vacuum. Nothing that seems fast or easy to explain, so she'll note that for later. 

Just sticking her finger through a magical boundary into vacuum wouldn't seriously damage her, Merrin thinks; humans can survive thirty seconds or a minute entirely in vacuum without permanent damage. She would be more worried about breaking the magical boundary and causing the surrounding air to rush in suddenly. Or about unknown weird effects. If Albe thinks they shouldn't test it then Merrin's going to listen to her. 

"You're worried that it's - something where explaining it imperfectly will mean I end up believing something dangerously false?" Merrin is certainly not inclined to ignore or push past that kind of concern! "I think it's not that urgent that I fully understand it? I do feel like I'm going to keep being confused about gods - and the afterlife thing - until I understand the categorization system, and I'm sort of holding off on making any plans for what to do here until I'm less confused about gods - but it clearly would be worse if I thought I understood it and was on the wrong track. Are there experts in studying it who would have a better chance of conveying it right?" 

"The problem that concerns me is more the amount of missing background information that we have about you and that you have about us.  You have really said very little about what dath ilan really is, or so I'm told, except that it lacks gods and alignments and afterlives, and knows more than we do of medicine, and has some means for preserving people against death that we do not need as urgently as you suspected.  And there are more people who enjoy causing pain than those who enjoy receiving it, so only a few of those who enjoy causing pain are ever allowed to learn what they are... I admit, I'm a little curious as to how it is said that they are selected for the privilege.  This is Radiance, Fire with Positive."

It's brilliant and multicolored and beautiful.

Since the quantity of missing background information on both sides is - Merrin is pretty sure - a lot of what has been making her feel deeply uneasy this entire time, she can't object to Albe worrying about it too. It should be a relief, really. 

...It's mostly a relief? It would be more purely relieving if it felt less - 'unbalanced' isn't quite the word - if it felt less like Albe was an alien with a psychological architecture incredibly far removed from any that ever existed in dath ilan, who is now looking at Merrin and, presumably, finding her just as strange from her own point of view, and - seeing Merrin as damaged, seeing something wrong with dath ilan, and maybe she's got a point but there's still going to be a direction to all her advice, right - 

- and Merrin wants to make her happy, wants to earn her pride and approval, wants to get it right and prove herself -

....But also, on some very deep fundamental level, Merrin dislikes it when people cleverer and more knowledgeable than her have agendas for her and want to steer her toward the right answers. She did even when it was 'all of Civilization' that felt like it had an agenda for her, that knew what was correct better than she could ever find on her own. And of course that's always been actively in conflict with her other drives - to fit in, to be part of a whole and contribute to it, to belong, to be the shape that other people approve of, to make people around her happy... And neither of those is in itself a truth-seeking motive, but - there's a balance, there, for Merrin. The not-wanting-to-be-steered is protective of something, and - in her hazy and probably-wrong conception of the categories here, it feels like in dath ilan it was protective against following 'Lawful Good' off a cliff - against the thing that Albe seems to be worried is what happened? Because it would be tempting, for a Merrin to try over and over to shape herself into exactly what Civilization wanted her to be, except that Civilization also tried to teach her how to notice when she's being nudged around by implicit social pressure - which, Merrin is pretty sure, is a vulnerability she has VASTLY MORE than most dath ilanis - and when she notices it she gets kind of prickly about it. 

It's not the case that she's never experienced implicit-social-pressure to prioritize leisure activities more, but this is a new direction for it to come from and it's WEIRD and makes her feel OFF BALANCE. 

Well, that's a her problem, isn't it. She's going to have to understand Golarion and figure out how to exist here, and inevitably she's going to be learning about it from locals who are coming from a massively different culture and perspective and have opinions – about dath ilan, about her, about what they're hoping she will accomplish here. Which Merrin is going to notice even if they're not trying to give advice pointed all in one direction - even if they're actively trying hard not to do that - because that's what her brain does, it tries very hard to figure out what everyone around her wants and make sure there are never any conflicts and no one is disappointed.

It makes sense for that to be uncomfortable for her; it doesn't make sense to be annoyed at them about it. It seems really unlikely Albe is doing this on purpose. Probably she just...doesn't have the social-pressure-vulnerability that Merrin has. It's hard to imagine her having it. 

"I agree, that's a major concern for me too. I - was kind of prioritizing coming up with an itemized list of questions to ask about Golarion, but plausibly after this I should sit down and work out a prioritized list of things to explain about dath ilan. Though I was sort of hoping someone with Governance is already doing that, you're going to know better than I do what questions you want answered." 

The Radiance is so pretty. 

"- Um, people aren't selected to find out about it - ever, as far as I know? Sometimes people just guess, or find out by accident. And then it's the standard problem where you have a scarce good and more demand than supply, so the obvious allocation method is money. I - guess it's pretty miserable to be one of the people who guesses by accident and isn't rich, which is a big reason why this is not widely advertised, it'd be an even worse problem then." 

Could that ACTUALLY be true.  No, that doesn't square with the rest of how dath ilan presents itself - what does Merrin mean, the obvious allocation method is money, that's not any form of Lawful Good that she's ever heard of, that's not Lastwall, that's how Osirion would solve the problem.  There's got to be some level on which, if you were raised Evil and not in dath ilan, you know better to forego skepticism about the final conclusion that in an Extremely Pure Lawful Good Society the rich elites get all the masochists and nobody else is allowed to know sadism exists.  There'd obviously be an excuse, it could even be a very plausible one, you have to look at where the result ended up.

Separately, she notes that Merrin thinks herself exceptionally vulnerable to social pressure for an inhabitant of dath ilan, and that it is best to avoid applying that pressure in a way that looks like people cleverer or more knowledgeable than Merrin herself.  Well, they've got three convenient Ostenso students for that.  Or their impersonators, if their Bluff doesn't look good enough.

Albe, speaking to Merrin, is curious about masochists being allocated to those with the most money; most Lawful Good societies that she knows would try to allocate masochists to those most in need of them.  She's also curious generally about how dath ilan was governed.

A dangerous-looking spherical cloud:  Quasi-Elemental Steam, Water plus Positive.

Merrin blinks at this for a few moments because - money just is the unit by which to measure how strongly you want or care about something? She feels slightly confused about how to parse 'need' separately from that - like, obviously in life-or-cryopreservation circumstances, dath ilan has triage systems to save the most people, but that's - not the category of thing that 'wanting to hurt people in a cuddleroom' is - most things aren't that? It feels a little like saying 'but we should allocate the largest apartments to the people who most need big living spaces' which is just - no, that isn't how that works? 

"...I think it's still hard for me to figure out how to answer that because I don't actually understand what you mean by 'Lawful' 'Good' - I understand why you don't want to explain further right now - but also I think it was Antonio who decided to label dath ilan as that? Not me since I don't know what it even means. If Lawful Good societies allocate scarce goods in general using - something that isn't money or an equivalent, um, universal-currency-of-account - did that translate? - then I'm confused again and probably dath ilan isn't that." 

She's disoriented, in a way that she should've maybe expected to be disoriented, by the suddenly dawning possibility of people and societies that are maybe just not on the alignment axes at all.  This is the talk of Osirion, clear and plain; Merrin is Lawful Good, likewise clear and plain; her boyfriends and these Keepers are very likely Lawful Evil.  Maybe that's simply a natural way to organize your society if there is no Pharasma and alignment axes do not there really exist?

"I'm feeling rather disoriented right now.  I should probably not try to explain why, and should instead go on listening, I think.  In particular about your - 'Governance'?"

An even-more-dangerous-looking spherical white crystal:  Water + Negative, Quasi-Elemental Salt.

...Answering that is actually kind of stressful in itself, and Merrin is inclined not to add any more bonus stress by poking the dangerous-looking magical not-salt while she's in the middle of thinking through and then giving her explanation. 

(Why do "water" and "negative" combined make "quasi-elemental" salt???? Unlike the other combinations of Magma and Void, this one is not even slightly intuitively clear to Merrin.) 

It's stressful to explain because - assuming that Governance in Cheliax works very very differently, which given all of the other upstream differences seems like almost a foregone conclusion - then Albe is inevitably going to ask for explanations of why things are different. And Merrin isn't sure she can answer them. Especially without, herself, having full context on Cheliax's Governance structures, but - it's deeper than that. She knows some facts, but not the...underlying generators that resulted in those facts being the case, in dath ilan. Because one thing she can be very sure of is that the system was set up by people far more intelligent than her. Who, at the time, did know whatever lies behind the wall that hides dath ilan's history. And Merrin is only in her mid-twenties, and hasn't invested any deliberate effort in learning more about dath ilan's Governance structures than the pieces she unavoidably noticed just by living there.

And to the extent that dath ilan is run the way it is for reasons deeper than historical accident, to the extent that there are truths about how things work and what works best that will hold across all the worlds, Merrin herself understands and contains only a few fragments of the underlying Law. And an embarrassing amount of what she does know on some level is going to be difficult and frustrating and maybe impossible to put into words, especially across a translation-magic barrier. 

- okay, so she's going to give an incomplete explanation. Not ideal but it seems unavoidable, and - almost certainly still better than not saying anything. People in Cheliax who are not her will be able to make some sense of the random sprinkling of surface facts and justifications that she knows. She will just have to do her best to only say things that she is very confident are true. 

"Right. So, um, high level view is - there are the nine Legislators, who are elected by several hundred Representatives, who are elected by around forty thousand Electors -" high level summary, Merrin reminds herself, "- anyway it bottoms out with the entire voting population of dath ilan voting for Delegates to represent their interests to the higher levels. The Legislators are the body within Governance that can - make changes to the decision-processes by which everything else is run. ...Well, for a really big change to the, um, meta level processes-used-to-generate-processes - did that translate? - you'd need to get a direct vote by the entire population - and usually the Keepers would be involved along with a whole lot of other departments within Governance but that's not written-into-the-law as a requirement." 

Pause to think. 

"Right, so that's the legislative side. The nine Legislators are responsible-accountable for hiring - and firing, if it comes up - the Chief Executive, who's responsible for the bureaucracy that contains a whole lot of departments that actually - carry out all the day to day work that needs doing to keep Civilization running. On that level, a lot of policy decisions - local ones, I mean, to distinguish from the sort of thing where you would want to alter the entire process - are made by prediction markets."

Oh wait is this the kind of thing that might fall into the Translation Gap. She....hasn't actually heard anyone mention what the markets are saying as the obvious input to their decisions, and - right they don't have computers - it's not like you need computing technology in theory to run prediction markets, but it sure increases the overhead, and if there were magic for it then someone would plausibly have mentioned it before...

"- Sorry, that might not translate. There are....information-aggregating betting systems, so anyone with expertise who thinks they know better than the market's consensus can add a bet and expect to make money if they're right? There's a lot of math involved in scoring for the payouts, the result is that you get an - aggregated summary of what the experts of dath ilan think will have the preferred result? Obviously this gives much more likely-to-work-in-expectation proposals - within any given department, for any given decision, there's a specific person who's accountable for making the judgement call, but in practice I think most of those judgement calls are consulting heavily with what the prediction markets say." 

Is that making sense. How badly is she mangling this. Merrin can't tell because she is insufficiently experienced in reading nonhumans' facial expressions. It seems like Albe is still following? 

"...The policy-prediction-markets are administrated by an arm of the bureaucracy, but - obviously there'd be an opening for bad incentives, if the Chief Executive could pass down orders to directly interfere with the markets? So there's a Keeper there in a meta-manager role," this is clearly a single word in Baseline and does not translate with perfect clarity to a Taldane word, "as a cutout between the Chief Executive's level and the department. Same holds for all the departments where you want to add some barriers against adversarial action or perverse incentives, so - Exception Handling, which is what I work for a lot of the time - the military, the police, the entire court system, the cryonics system, and the department that actually administrates the elections for the Legislators and the levels below them in the hierarchy." 

Albe will be more expressive about nodding along and indicating that she's still here and listening.

(She's mostly trying to track who has the actual power here and it's sounding like it's possibly the Keepers but the whole thing sounds so complicated she is not remotely sure which may of course be part of the point from the Keepers' perspectives.)

(Also Merrin just casually ran past 'who has control of the military' like that was 0.1% of her attention, worth literally just two words, which is... it sure is something.)

"- I guess I should explain Keepers more. The Keepers are....not really a part of Governance, and - in some sense they're apart from the rest of Civilization, they're - not accountable to anyone or anything except when they've promised to be. They're– sort of the entire thing they do is keeping promises? They're - they try to understand and follow and - more perfectly embody - the Algorithm."

This is a short word, in Baseline. It...mostly doesn't translate clearly into Taldane at all. 

"Anyway, they still - mostly don't have roles-with-accountability within Governance, just - a lot of points of contact, anywhere you need a cutout within the hierarchy to prevent perverse incentives. And obviously you go to a Keeper if you have a really hard question to answer or decision to make. They're - the people who know all the - true things about the world that are unpleasant to know - they're trying to practice correct thinking even when that's - bad, for humans, for actually living nice lives - they train to - keep themselves sane even in the face of infohazards. ...One of the departments under Exception Handling is infohazards, obviously that has a lot of Keeper involvement in secondary-management roles. You....have to be really smart to train as a Keeper, like, multiple standard deviations smarter than me."

Which, if Merrin's vague impressions are right, there - might not be anyone with that intelligence level in Golarion. Except for gods. Which she still knows worryingly little about, because - it matters, she thinks, that the Keepers are still humans, even as they're studying and learning and passing down the pieces they can hold of something so much bigger. 

".....Sorry I am realizing that I just said a lot of words with high information density and maybe it would help if I had paper and I could draw you a flowchart or diagram of it." 

They've gone through about half the remaining para-elements and quasi-elements while all that was being spoken of.

"Mm, I feel that the main thing I am missing right now, is not to hear all the parts and pieces spoken of, but rather, to understand - how anything happens in practice?  Suppose that a portal opened between Golarion and dath ilan, and some dath ilani was first to find it, and suppose that they were -"  Loyal?  She can't say loyal??  "- aligned with, friendly to, Governance - who would they tell, who would have charge of it, who would decide what was to be done from there?"

Huh, Albe is - putting a lot of emphasis on specifying that the initial report is coming from someone friendly-and-aligned with Governance? Merrin has worked with - and trained for - hypothetical scenarios involving individual unaligned actors - but she really doubts that literally anyone she's ever met in real life wouldn't report it via the standard channels if that happened to them in real life. 

"...So that's pretty solidly under Exception Handling for the very immediate response, I think. We - okay, we don't literally have a written process for 'a portal opens to Golarion' but Exception Handling has processes for responding to First Contact from aliens, we have kind of a huge number of them actually, for a really wide range of possible scenarios. One of the first priorities, alongside verifying that it's real at all, would be to - causally contain the situation until someone - a very high-ranked Keeper probably but I'm not fully read in on that part of the response flowchart either - has thought about unknown infohazards of unknown magnitude and assessed the risk. For a literal portal, we'd - I guess that'd actually be almost the exact same containment protocol as the 'crashed spaceship' scenario."

Which Merrin is SO READY for. Merrin has REHEARSED this. If Civilization decided that they needed to keep a city's inhabitants fed and provided with medical care and emergency cryopreservation as needed then Merrin has this so covered.

"Um, there are equally fleshed-out protocols for verifying it's real, I'm not myself fully read in on the details - a lot of the verification aspects for First Contact situations are kept secret on purpose to make it harder for, um, someone to decide to play a prank on Civilization and fake it." 

(A fact about dath ilan is that it contains many serious, intelligent people with a strong tendency toward cunning mastermind plots, and most of them are not going to use their talent to play a criminal prank of that scale and waste huge amounts of resources, but you super can't just count on that not happening.)

"If it was a - non-adversarial initial contact - um, I don't remember the exact flowchart for reporting, but very quickly, as soon as it was contained and verified - probably actually while that was still going on - it would be escalated to the Chief Executive, unless for some reason the Keeper-cutout at the Exception Handling department-head level, in collaboration with the very-high-ranked Keeper responsible for assessing infohazard status, decided to keep it contained at that point. I haven't actually encountered any specific training hypotheticals where they'd decide that. There might be some scenarios where the Keepers would sideways-escalate it to another department where they have a secondary-management role. Anyway, assuming not that, we'd have the prediction market department looped in on it in like...ten minutes from the time it was first reported to someone at Exception Handling, assuming otherwise-normal functioning of all of our infrastructure, I'm guessing the portal wouldn't disrupt electronics...." 

That's an Abyss - maybe in this case, she actually should think Hell - that's a Hell of a lot of obedience to take for granted in your population.  And from all of Merrin's other thoughts it really doesn't come across as likely that this is obedience is because any dath ilani who failed to report the portal would die over several months... actually there'd be no point to stop after several months if you couldn't send them to Hell afterwards, but she digresses.

It does sound like the Keepers hold the real power, though, and she can't even tell from Merrin's thoughts whether she doesn't know it or just takes it for granted.

She is going to make a deliberate effort not to react badly to this setup just because it sounds like their version of the Church of Asmodeus succeeded in sidelining their version of Queen and Crown.

"So it sounded like you worked for - a very powerful branch of Governance, with a lot of Keeper involvement?  Did you tend to meet many of the Keepers?  Perhaps there's more important things I should be asking about," there aren't, "but I admit to being curious; they sound so... mysterious."

Merrin's most memorable interaction with a Keeper was in no way work-related. She does not say that. 

"Um, in day to day medical response work, I don't that much? There are several levels of management between me and the director of the Exception Handling department, who actually works closely with the Keeper-cutout there. Um, there is a process where I - or anyone else under the Exception Handling department - could escalate a concern directly to them, but I haven't...done that. There's also a process I could use to receive a recognition code if a high-ranked Keeper needed to give me a really weird direct order and I needed a way to verify it was real. Also has not actually happened to me. I've done training scenarios that involved consulting with lower-ranked Keepers, I guess, but - the vast majority of what I know about them is from stories." 

(To the extent that Merrin reads fiction these days, it's almost always fiction about Exception Handling scenarios, which of course tend to heavily feature Keeper involvement. It would not occur to Merrin that this might be an inaccurate representation. Why would Civilization support the continued existence of fiction that gave people misleading models. ....There is nonzero fiction with Merrin in it - some people really like medical-emergency-response adventure plots - and Merrin doesn't usually read it because it makes her really self-conscious, but she would definitely inform someone if it was inaccurate and she assumes anyone who knows her in real life does that.) 

She can't, because it's info off Detect Thoughts, but now she really really wants to ask how this person ended up in novels when all the rest of Merrin's thought processes seem to mostly indicate somebody who wasn't that important -

Actually, didn't Merrin just hint -

"Forgive me for being curious, but if a portal opened between dath ilan and Golarion, would it be likely that you, yourself, would be called to that incident?"

"- Yeah, I'd be on the list of personnel to be immediately paged and collected for that. I've focused pretty hard on doing Exception Handling trainings, I think I'm on the call list for, like, five different subdepartments. For that one in particular, I'm trained in operating with equipment or supply limitations where you need to improvise, which could apply if an entire city needs to be sealed off for an unknown length of time, and additionally I'm - unusually good at working for long shifts without significant deterioration in my mental performance, so anything where you'd want to minimize the total number of personnel sent in - and 'they're being sealed in with unknown infohazards' counts - is something where I would likely end up near the top of the list. And I've done a lot of training scenarios for urgently figuring out how to provide medical treatment to aliens."

Yes, this is extremely unlikely to ever come up in real life - though, um, Merrin believed that before she found herself in another world which seems like a major update - but anyway they're really fun okay. 

She starts running Detect Desires and Detect Anxieties alongside Detect Thoughts and focuses even more of her attention on trying to follow every detail of Merrin's thought processes.  If what she suspects now is true -

"You sound like you must be a very special and important person in Civilization, then, if you'd be among the first to be told of any such momentous event; somebody who must surely have been deserving of great wealth and high place?"

???????????????????????

Merrin's feelings are mostly - confusion? She is worried that Albe is somehow fundamentally misunderstanding what dath ilan is like and maybe her explanation missed something?

She's not upset about it, just - trying to figure out where to even start with that. 

"I mean, I get paid for my work? Extra for training scenarios that are at inconvenient times or where I don't get warning in advance or that are just unpleasant or uncomfortable, and I would get a much bigger bonus if a real First Contact event happened, because sealing myself in a city with an open portal to another world would involve some actual danger. Normally it's done by, like, bidding what your cheerful price is for 'being woken up in the middle of the night' and 'a scenario that lasts fifteen hours straight' but I pay someone to do the actual math for me because it's annoying. ...Also I probably still have some passive income from, like, being featured on television, a lot of the training scenarios or Annual Rehearsals I'm in are televised so people can stay up to date and bid on the prediction markets in real time, and then I get to use their expertise as well in decisionmaking." 

Merrin does not actually have the slightest idea how much she earns from the Exception Handling work. She outsourced it when she was nineteen and first had significant work income; she really doesn't prefer to have to do extra math about things that aren't even her area of expertise, and investing her money responsibly is something she's deeply unqualified to do. When she was twenty-one and getting to the point that she was doing high-cheerful-price trainings or scenarios most weeks, she set a cap on what she thought she actually needed for annual living expenses - a generous amount, she thinks, her apartment is really nice and very, very conveniently located in Default - and the rest goes 10% into a long-term-savings-investment and 90% to charities she picked. Then the whole masochism thing happened and it turned out to be really lucrative, so she's - pretty sure she asked her agent not to bother reserving any of the Exception Handling income for living expenses. She does keep all the money from the bids to date her. It feels - more hers, somehow, this isn't something where Civilization is already investing vast resources in training her. And she suspects her boyfriends would feel - weirder about it, less comfortable accepting what was genuinely her happy price - if she was just donating most of it. She does have to do the bidding herself on that because her investment agent is not approved to know the infohazard, so she knows roughly how much she makes annually, though honestly she's, like, over a year behind on actually properly reviewing her budget. Her lifestyle does not leave a lot of free time when the thing she feels like doing is her personal finances. She's slightly embarrassed about it. 

"- I think I don't know how to parse the second thing you're asking. I - have the amount of influence I should have given my actual expertise?" 

(Merrin is not completely unaware that she has what one might term 'fans', that quite a lot of people tune in to watch her televised scenarios. She sees the volume of updates to the prediction markets, after all. Since Exception Handling emergency-response-medicine is just objectively very cool, this isn't surprising, though it's definitely convenient for Merrin personally, getting to have her plans informed by lots and lots of aggregated expertise. She sort of tries not to think about it too much on a day to day basis, though, it makes her self-conscious. Merrin tries to do her own part by watching other people's scenarios during her off-time but she's not actually very good at prediction-market betting and she probably doesn't really pull her weight there.) 

She was expecting Merrin's thoughts to show spikes of fear, horror, anxiety, or possibly particular thoughts glowing with pleasure and happiness, as her thoughts steered around the question of whether she deserved more importance or pay than she had.

What she's actually seeing is thought processes that sound so reasonable that she's finding part of herself questioning whether she's truly looking at a mind-controlled slave.  Or just somebody with INT 16 and WIS 20, who would be among the first called in if a portal was found to Golarion, who in some perfectly normal way thinks of herself as a below-average individual unsuited to most jobs in her society, who gave nearly-all of her income to what she was told was a charity, and just happens to never look or think about the amount of wealth she's supposed to have from her supposed job, and subsists off the proceeds of prostitution from her secret sadist 'boyfriends' - Merrin is apparently a public spectacle, often performing in some form of arena whose details are hard to make out, but definitely with crowds betting on her, and yet her emotional sense of her own place is that of some unimportant functionary -

On a purely intuitive level, her high-powered Detections are telling her that these are totally normal thought processes and maybe that's what mind control just looks like when you somehow do it without any magic and this is the most fascinating and impressive feat of slavemaking that she has ever seen.  Ever heard of.  This is a thinking curious INT 16 WIS 20 grandmaster-level professional slave who has no idea what she is.

Part of her is still not sure that this isn't just actually how dath ilani society works because that is how totally reasonable and uninfluenced Merrin's thought processes look to Detection if you ignore everything about where she ended up.

...how one would go about breaking this person out of her current mental prison - and into a more interesting one, of course - is something where she'd just have absolutely no idea where to start, if she can't use real torture.  It seems very clear that the false world Merrin lives in is going to be complete and consistent; that any simple questions "But what about..." or "Isn't it funny that the end result was..." will be met with totally reasonable answers, followed by suspicions as to why this question is even being asked and totally reasonable reasons for Merrin to stop listening to whoever is talking to her.

"Forgive me if my curiosity is painful," says Albe, "but - I am wondering what accommodations and - even luxuries - you might have had?  I thought, perhaps I should ask now, before you grow to miss them too much."  They couldn't have been literally feeding her slaves-bread, right, that wouldn't make sense for a slave this expensive.

- Detect Desires is now picking up a brief but VERY INTENSE pang of homesickness. Merrin is aware that no longer having her really lovely apartment - she moved into it when the new skyscraper opened in Default, the one which is like five minutes' transit from the airport - it seemed more worth it once she started dating several more people who lived a plane flight away, on top of all the travel she was already doing for work. It's big and spacious and has an entire room dedicated to her collection of Exception Handling-related practice equipment.

Cheliax is poorer than dath ilan, and even if she can contribute to changing that, she probably won't within her lifetime see a city like Default again, let alone have her own beautiful little corner of it. It's not Cheliax's fault that they're less wealthy in material resources than dath ilan, and it would be incredibly rude and awkward, and also - petty, given the scale of everything happening here - to say out loud that she misses her apartment and expects their accommodations to be pretty disappointing. Merrin is absolutely not going to express this, and intends to try her very hardest to be cheerful about whatever quality of apartment they offer her. 

(And forget about her house, she doesn't get to have prediction markets, let alone any of the rest of the vast structure of Civilization, which sort of feels like having one of her arms cut off.)

(Though, who knows, maybe there's some very brilliant wizard here who has a volcano lair, Cheliax certainly leans doompunk enough that she can picture it.) 

Okay but she still has to answer the question. With something that is not awkward and hurtful to say to the people who are clearly trying very hard to make her feel welcome to the point of literally trying to seduce her

Merrin shrugs. "I'm - honestly going to miss airplanes a lot, even though I died in one and you'd think that would give me less enthusiasm for the concept. It'd be different if instant-movement magic worked on me but I think - still not the same, Civilization in dath ilan is just - wealthy enough that it's not even a big deal, to fly halfway around the world for a weekend. I'm...going to miss the conveniences of, of being in a Civilization that I know - I'm excited to find out what you can do with magic, here, but it's still not -" 

Not home. 

(Glimpses, in her thoughts, of vast metal machines taking off from smooth paved roads and soaring across the sky - a view of the ocean sparkling, so far far below - the view from Merrin's floor-to-ceiling window in her apartment that fills the entire wall of her living room, watching the skyscrapers of Default catching the evening light - 

- numbers on a glowing screen, flickering and changing, and comfort and feeling safe because this, this is a process that bends toward the truth and the best available answer and plan of action and Merrin can trust it and can trust all the structures around it, and she can maybe explain to Cheliax how to build skyscrapers but she can't explain the Law that governs Civilization, all she has is fragments half-understood and without any reference or guidance it already sort of feels a little as though what she thought she knew is starting to crumble to dust in her hands -) 

This is actually kind of hard to talk about. 

She shakes her head. "I don't know. I miss prediction markets for decision-making. ...Some of the things I miss like my favorite meals or my best outfits are - probably more replicable, here - but I don't know enough to teach Cheliax how to build the Civilization I know." 

...it's impossible to tell, with thoughts so glancing, were those slave accomodations, or not?  Merrin didn't think they were and the glimpses via Detection suggests that Merrin was hardly being treated as a slave by Cheliax's standards.  By dath ilan's?  It's so hard to tell at this remove.  Merrin was, in theory, much wealthier than anything that she tried to draw in the way of 'living expenses', but what kind of living situation that corresponded to - could Merrin actually have had more wealth than she needed, could it actually have been that -

No!  Merrin thinks of herself as too small of a person for somebody who would have been first called to a portal, for somebody with so many elite sadistic 'boyfriends', who had crowds cheering her and betting on her in some arena.  The Keepers weren't keeping Merrin poor, that would have been a ridiculous and meaningless economy for a slave this important.  They were keeping Merrin weak, unaware of the power she could have garnered for herself and wielded in her own name.  Merrin has no awareness of wealth as anything that can be used for ends besides personal luxuries, she has no thought that wealth foregone is power foregone, and that's why Merrin never tries to use the wealth she thinks she has.  Maybe Merrin does hold vast wealth, legally, there if Merrin ever looks for it, which she never will; the Keepers may not bother with keeping wealth, in a place like dath ilan, so long as they keep power.

Amazing they just wear the name openly like that.

...and now she has to face the agonizing decision between whether to try to matching her own wits against Merrin's makers, to make Merrin realize what was done to her, for Cheliax to offer Merrin everything that was taken from her, in exchange for a damnation she never needs to know is coming.  Or just take advantage of her incredibly convenient brainwashing.

While all this was going on, they've run out the elements to test.  The last element Albe is testing, Ooze, fails to penetrate Merrin's antimagical shield.  It's not surprising, in one sense; in another it is.  Even a Prismatic Sphere has seven vulnerabilities for each of its seven layers.

"All right, there's one more class of tests, which is magic items."  Albe withdraws a wand from the wall - this magic item is not, technically, actually a 'wand', but it looks like one.  "Try pointing this at me and saying," Albe points the wand at herself, "Belial."

A small dart of light, fast as an arrow, pulses out from the wand and apparently vanishes as it touches Albe.

Albe offers the wand to Merrin.

Thinking about what she misses the most - talking about it, talking about how dath ilan works and holds together - was, perhaps, not great for Merrin's current emotional stability. She's - so lonely.  

Lonely, and scared - though even Merrin herself isn't entirely sure what she's afraid of or why, it certainly isn't going to come across clearly to Detect Anxieties - and some other emotion that she can't even begin to name, except that it feels cold and unsteady and murky. 

- also she really needs to focus on what they're doing here. And then make sure she gets answers to her own questions, before some other distraction comes up. 

She accepts the wand. It was clearly harmless to Albe when used on herself, and it's very very likely it will, in Merrin's hand, do nothing, and she's still an amount uneasy about it but - probably the literal worst case is that, if some kind of horrible unintended side effect somehow manages to kill Albe, they can bring her back. Which would presumably be very inconvenient for everyone but it's also vanishingly unlikely, and nonfatal injuries are even less of a problem, and in short it is not actually worth doing more mental risk analysis here. 

"Belial?" Merrin says, carefully imitating the syllables. 

Nothing.

Albe takes the wand back, not holding it like it's particularly dangerous, and feeds it back into the wall.

From the wall Albe draws forth a ring.  She slips it onto her own finger, slips it off again.  "Try putting this on a finger; it's meant to cast a physical protection about you.  It is not impossible that it would fall outside the range of the magical interference, though I rather expect not."

Sure. She tries the ring on. 

She's on her own and this is TERRIBLE. It's one thing to operate on her own that for a training scenario that has a stopping point, at which point there is a debrief and guidance, and it's different if it's just her indefinite future, if and until she can build...whatever she can, whatever shards of Civilization and Law she understands enough to put together from scratch...and even if she can do that it feels like she's lost something, something more nebulous than the obvious parts she can name. 

But Merrin knows how to handle things which are terrible. And one of the ways to handle things which are terrible is that you plan ahead, but you don't try to emotionally carry the weight of the entire future all at once. 

"- How many more magic items to try? I notice I'm feeling impatient to get to the point when I can take out my questions list about Golarion and Cheliax and cover all the things on it that you're not worried will be somehow risky to explain, and - I wouldn't be surprised if the particular questions I ask will help point at questions you should be asking about dath ilan." 

Poor thing!  No one so accustomed to slavery should be without a master, indeed.  She will certainly do whatever she can to help Merrin with that problem.

Albe takes the ring back.  "I'd intended to try a few more things, but I confess, I have a suspicion at this point how those tests will go.  Three such tests are important, though."

"First, I need to very weakly enchant that needle of which I spoke before, and try poking you with it.  Even for an enchantment that doesn't really do anything, that's still a task of a few minutes, and I won't be much for speaking during that."  A needle extrudes from the wall as Albe speaks, along with a small lump of silvery metal.

Sure. Merrin will be very still and quiet and take the opportunity to try to catch up on some processing, because this conversation has been swerving all over the place and covered a lot of ground and she hasn't had a chance at all to start putting it together and propagating the relevant updates. 

Things that have come up. 

- In addition to afterlives, you can bring people back from the dead with magic. Which has the obvious ramifications on things like 'lab safety standards'. 

- Among the differences in protocol, flirting with and attempting to seduce visitors in your dangerous magical research lab is a thing. 

- They apparently do not consider sadism or masochism to be infohazardous at all. Merrin didn't actually get the relative prevalence in the population from Albe, she should ask once Albe is interruptible. 

- Albe...seems to think that Merrin should try the sadism side of things, and it seems that Albe would approve if Merrin ended up enjoying it. Which...implies...that people in Golarion are reasonably likely to be both? 

- She has now explained the steered-by-Tropes space of hypotheses for her arrival here, but not the Romance theory, although that is...maybe actually fine to explain given the abovementioned not being locally considered an infohazard anyway. Merrin is mostly worried that it would escalate the flirting further.

- Their whole categorization system is even weirder than it sounded at a first glance. Albe has (quite reasonable) concerns that if she tries to explain it without sufficient care then Merrin will end up dangerously confused or misled. 

- You can pass messages to gods (unclear how) and gods can send people visions with instructions. 

- Albe...had some reactions to her explaining Governance. Merrin isn't going to go through all of that right now but she noted that Albe seemed particularly curious about Keepers.