Okay what? 

Shit. 

Julien Camille Élie Cotonnet is in the catacombs, more than 300 feet underground, which means the unknown wizard – and anyone who suddenly appears in a locked room is almost certainly a wizard – must at the very least be fourth circle and capable of casting Dimension Door. It could be one of their own, as of course neither he nor anyone else knows the faces of revolutionaries outside their own cell, and powerful casters habitually go around disguised. But if she's a fellow rebel, and cleared to know about this place, she'd know the passcode. More to the point, she'd know the consequences for not giving the passcode. A government spy, then. This should really be a hopeless fight – not that it matters just now – but she looks off-balance, maybe even injured. Quick, before she recovers – 

(Ten seconds after she lands, Merrin is tackled by a teenage boy. What he lacks in muscle mass, he more than makes up for in sheer, desperate terror.) 

Merrin does not move or particularly look around in the first ten seconds, after verifying that she is at least not currently on a crashed plane which is on fire. Her surroundings make way less sense than that and she's not in an ideal emotional state for responding to this and is trying to collect herself a bit before doing anything. 

She is very startled about being tackled!

Merrin has self-defense training which actually goes well past the basics, including some training on how to defend herself and immobilize someone when she doesn't want to hurt them. (Dath ilanis experience psychotic breaks sometimes, and they're not usually violent but they sometimes are, and as an EMT this comes up.) She instinctively starts trying to get in a position where she can throw the kid off her - 

- at which point the completely obvious falls into place, which is that a pretty good explanation for the whole 'plane crash, experiencing dying, and then inexplicably waking up in a place that looks kind of underground' could be that she is herself experiencing a psychotic break. And was probably - about to do something extremely concerning that would harm herself or others? In which case she should absolutely not fight back. 

From Élie's perspective, the young woman in incredibly strange and very high-quality-looking clothes spends about two seconds resisting, pretty effectively - she would likely have a good chance of throwing him off given time - and then instead goes completely limp. 

"Tsi-imbi!" she manages to yelp another few seconds after that. 

That's weird behavior for a government spy, some part of his brain reports, while the rest of him fashions a makeshift gag out of a cravat and ties her hands and runs through all the languages he knows and tries to remember if tsi-imbi means anything in any of them. 

The fact that her clothes look strange doesn't surprise him, who knows what they give to agents in Egorian, but the fact that they're not magical very much does. Stranger still, she doesn't seem to be carrying any magic items at all – or rather, she isn't carrying anything that registers as magical to Detect Magic. A spy would have good reason to conceal the auras. But then why wear something so obviously out of the ordinary? What else does she have with her? 

That's not very professional of him but Merrin is probably insane right now so she doesn't resist! 

She has a lot of pockets on her jacket and her pants, many of which have objects in them. They're fastened shut in a way that doesn't show up to Detect Magic but also doesn't give any visible material hints to how it works. She's wearing a slim, lightweight satchel with a strap that goes over her shoulder; the material is soft and apparently conforms exactly to the shape of her body. The satchel doesn't appear to have much in it, but the method of opening or closing it is equally mysterious. 

He has a knife. If that doesn't work, Open is a cantrip. 

The knife does not work.

The cantrip does! The flap on the bag pops open. It's...still completely unclear what was holding it shut in the first place. 

Inside, it has a number of cleverly arranged pouches and pockets for keeping objects of various sizes and shapes neatly organized. There's a comb and a little tube of something (it's scented lip balm) and a clear flexible little pouch holding several stiff rectangles of something that isn't paper or metal or wood, with designs on them and what's probably writing except it's not a script he's ever seen or heard of.

The rest is...actually it looks like it might be first-aid related? There are recognizable bandages of several sizes, sealed in clear wrapping, and a clear flat box full of a neat row of tubes with creams in them and tiny bottles and vials of liquid, and there are more items that make even less sense at a first glance but are arranged near those ones. 

Merrin continues not to resist but is increasingly confused. Her initial read of the situation is making less sense, now. 

Well, Élie didn't think he was going to need Comprehend Languages today. Fortunately, he's in the habit of leaving spell slots open. He pulls a heavy book out of thin air and starts studying it intently; it'll take about fifteen minutes. 

Merrin, who is physically unable to interrupt or try further communication, watches him. Tries to gauge how hard it would be to get loose of the binding on her wrists without actually moving; she judges it as probably doable, this kid is clearly not trained in the most effective techniques for tying people up and a couple of her boyfriends are, plus there was that one time in the Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival where she got captured by aliens and tied up and had to escape. 

She does not attempt this; the teenager looks incredibly stressed and - scared? - and certainly jumpy and he has a KNIFE. Which would be mostly nonworrying if anything else about this situation made sense, but in fact, it doesn't. 

Maybe she's just straightforwardly hallucinating? It wouldn't be the least plausible hallucination scenario for someone having a psychotic break who also has Merrin's life experience? Except that in her medical experience, generally that degree of actual immersive fully-realstic-seeming hallucination is, one, really extremely rare to the point of mostly not being a thing. And two, would almost always be seen with much worse cognitive disturbance than she's noticing. Her metacognition could be impaired, of course, but she's sitting here - lying here - having thoughts that logically follow from each other, and she's entirely able to notice that the discontinuity between the plane crash and...this...makes no flaming sense, as opposed to having dream-logic about it. 

Hopefully at some point this teenager who is inexplicably panicked about her presence will calm down and finish whatever he's doing and explain??

This teenager realizes in the middle of preparing his spell that he's acting like an absolute godsdamn lunatic. 

What is it he's hoping to find? Proof that this mysterious woman isn't from the secret police. Why does it matter? It really, profoundly does not – she teleported into a secret rebel hideout harboring a wanted fugitive. If she's the enemy, he's lost the moment he lets her open her mouth. There's no information he could find that should convince him it's safe to do so. What he needs to do – what he needs to have done in the first place, before giving her time to plan – is slit her throat and let Pharasma sort her out. 

– and she might even be innocent. He could live with that. But in the much more likely event that she's guilty, he would have with his own hands condemned a soul to Hell. 

That shouldn't give him pause. He did his best to start the riot two days ago; now there are hundreds dead and most of those are damned. He knew the costs and did it anyway, he can't bring himself to regret it, he's an awful hypocrite and he'd even say he deserves his inevitable malediction, if any living being could. ....but he's not going to kill her. Given that he's not going to kill her, he needs to make a genuine effort to figure out what's actually going on. If she's a fourth-circle wizard, she could have easily overpowered him – the fact that she didn't try suggests her resources might be more limited. How can he tell? If Lucien were here, he might try reading her aura, but Élie has no way of contacting him and no idea if he's even still alive. No use dwelling on that. Next. He's deliberately avoided studying enchantment, and even if he had, he'd be useless against a more powerful caster – but that suggests an obvious test. 

"I'm sorry," he says in a language unlike anything Merrin's ever heard. "I should really have tried this much earlier. Blame a lifetime spent trying very hard never to think of my own motivations. Color Spray." 

Now the bound and gagged woman on the floor is also unconscious! 

Is she faking? Looks like no. That answers one of his questions; a caster more powerful than himself would have shrugged it off. This situation just got enormously more confusing, but hopefully slightly less deadly! 

When Merrin comes to and recovers her vision, the boy is eagerly reading one of her rectangles of ambiguous material. She's still bound, but no longer gagged.  

One of them is just a piece of flat (and nearly indestructible) plastic and it's an ID card! Not all dath ilanis carry something like this on them at all times, but Merrin is often in situations where there might not be Internet access (or electricity) and where it's important to confirm her identity and qualifications.

The card informs Élie that this woman is named Merrin (followed by a unique identification number), that her parents are Elshorm and Salthin, she lives in a place called Default at [some sort of complicated specification with several different numbers in it, maybe her address?], here are a few even more inscrutable ways of contacting her, here is - something? - that is in some way related to her or a specification of something owned by her? (Comprehend Languages is trying to translate the term of a 'website url' but this is an even bigger conceptual gap than email addresses.) 

She reports directly to this person at the Department of Exception Handling, sub-department: medical response in large-scale disasters. She is a fully qualified emergency medical technician. Here are a list of all her additional special qualifications in Exception Handling. There are, like, eight of them. They take up the entirety of the text box for that. She is certified to work with the - some kind of military body? - and she is certified to respond to emergencies expected to last more than eight hours and she is certified to respond to emergencies where she will not have access to expert backup or something called 'prediction markets'. She's trained to use 'military power armor'. There are some other pieces of information on the very very information-dense card which are even harder to make any sense of. 

The second rectangle is slightly thicker and heavier, though still very lightweight. It's a power-efficient e-reader. It's currently loaded with a flashcard app; with trial and error, Élie can probably figure out the tapping motion that flips between question and answer, and the sort of sliding motion that flicks it to the next card, and the different tapping motion that would theoretically open up the 'further information' page but is currently instead displaying that there is NO SIGNAL DETECTED.

The questions are all about medical treatment. Other than that, the content is totally unfamiliar and technical and hard to follow. 

Merrin wakes up. 

...What just happened?? She definitely lost consciousness for a bit there! She's not really sure why! She didn't think he administered any drugs to her - if it were a gas she would likely have smelled something and it wouldn't have been instantaneous and it should have gotten him as well...

At this point, most dath ilani would be terrified and panicking. Merrin isn't not scared, but she's been in situations that were scarier than this, even if most of them weren't real per se. She turns her head, sees what the kid is doing, and then tries to squirm and make a noise to convey that she's now awake. 

Well that raises a lot more questions! The first of which, stupidly, is what kinds of disasters this person would expect to be involved in that typically get resolved in less than eight hours. Élie's never heard of a place called Default and suspects that it isn't on Golarion. It could be some sort of complicated government deception, but it's not the sort of thing he expects them to come up with –  someone at some point would have had to have had an original thought and that's hardly the sort of thing they encourage. One of the outlying regions of Axis, maybe? That would explain the strange technology and frankly terrifying amount of bureaucracy implied by her identification document; on the other hand, the dead don't typically have militaries or require physicians, and this woman clearly isn't a petitioner. Another planet? He knows some of them are inhabited, and that they might have less access to divine magic, which would explain having a certifying body for non-magical medical professionals but not how she got here in the first place – 

Oh, she's awake. (She'll notice she's no longer gagged). He holds the larger rectangle up so she can see it, tapping on words as he finds them. "Why – are – you – here?" 

Merrin is so confused about his method of communication! This seems so unnecessarily roundabout.

Also she doesn’t have anything for him! She was on a plane and now she’s here and she didn’t do this on purpose and has no explanation for how it happened.

She swallows. “I - sorry - I don’t actually know how I got here, I’d been guessing I was probably hallucinating. The last thing I remember before this is being on a plane that was about to crash, but I - wasn’t expecting to still exist after that, so something outside my model is happening. Um, what did you observe happen?” 

She was on a – flying machine? – he can figure out what those are later – and she was expecting to cease to exist? That's at least slight evidence towards her being some kind of outsider and Default being a region of probably–Axis, outsiders cease to exist when destroyed. Maybe her people are just really into medical roleplay? Whatever. This stupid flat book doesn't have enough words in it and the ones it does have are all things like "subdural hematoma."

"You – acutely – appear. What – etiology? What – location – Default?"

....Seriously, though, why is he attempting to communicate with her via pointing at words in her medical flashcards, when he seems to be able to read those words and understand her spoken answers just fine? Merrin's first stupid thought is 'he's worried about some variant on Keeper talk control' but she's not actually sure that the weird circumlocution thing he's doing would help and also why would he be worried about this especially from her specifically. He read her identification card. She's clearly not a Keeper. 

Her second slightly-less-stupid guess is that he's doing some kind of training scenario or maybe she's ended up in an incredibly weird subvariant of the Annual Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival, but the problem there is that you could explain almost arbitrary weird observations with 'maybe it's a weird training scenario.' 

"I appeared suddenly? That - um - I guess makes as much sense as anything else." He doesn't know where Default is? That's even weirder. Default is Default because it's the city everyone knows about. That's practically what the name means. She can give him a description of what continent it's on and what other commonly-known landmarks are various distances from it? 

He grabs some ink and paper and sketches out a rough world map. "Here." And then, out loud – "Golarion." Back to tapping – "Know – this – location?"

Merrin twists slightly on the floor to get a better viewing angle. Squints at his map. It doesn't look right? It's - not instantly obvious that it's not-right enough to be sure it's not the continents she knows shown in some obscure map-projection style, given the hasty quality of his sketching (and the fact that a lot of people Merrin knows are really not very good at drawing), but - no, what's that enormous lake or inland sea doing in the middle of that continent, that doesn't belong there. And the other two continents tied together by a narrow isthmus and running north-south aren't shaped right at all, and there's also maybe an entire additional landmass? 

"- That's not dath ilan," she says. "Did I somehow end up on another planet because I have no idea for how that could happen!" 

(Hypothesis that this is an obscure variant on an alien-invasion rehearsal except instead, presumably, a version where the aliens kidnapped her: not entirely ruled out? It wouldn't explain the flaming plane crash but it's not completely unimaginable that she could have consented in advance to get memory-altering drugs, which do exist - drugs that can cause fully immersive hallucinatory plane crashes on purpose don't exist as far as Merrin knows but maybe that was an ordinary nightmare...? She's aware that she is really stretching here but she's failing to come up with alternate hypotheses, just yet.) 

Okay, back to the alien hypothesis. Aliens who don't have afterlives? Aliens who don't know they have afterlives because their Gods are so uninvolved they somehow failed to mention it? Aliens who are also outsiders because several of the outer planes are infinite and there's no reason to suppose there aren't whole planets out there if you think about it? He also doesn't have any idea how or why she could have gotten here, but if any of the handful of spellcasters on Golarion capable of casting interplanetary teleport are involved there are quite a few people who need to know immediately.

"Think – yes. Remember – person – say – " he repeats the phrase for Teleport in every language he knows, Taldane and Draconic and Infernal and Kelish and Osirian and Elven and even Azlanti. "Person – touch – you? Remember – nausea?" That's a common teleportation side effect. "Remember – person – say – " Plane Shift, same deal as before. 

Merrin listens so closely and intently to this! It does not really resolve any of her key confusions. 

"....I don't remember hearing either of those phoneme strings? I - maybe had some nausea, just from turbulence and motion sickness, given that the plane was crashing. It wasn't the thing I was paying attention to. The last thing I remember is - pain, I guess. It was very brief but I'd expected dying via massive trauma to be fast." 

He wishes he could cast Tongues. Of course, he wishes he wasn't a useless excuse for a wizard who can't even hang second-circle spells, so he could be doing something helpful not cowering in a thousand-year-old basement, and if wishes were horses he'd never make a silver casting Mount. Useless or not, if unknown and vastly powerful beings are causing metaphysical anomalies two days into his revolution he'd better do something about it. 

"You – come." He holds up a length of cloth. "Not – see. Not – know – this – location."  

Merrin isn't sure what he's trying to convey by holding up the length of cloth, but she's aware that she's not thinking at her best right now. A predictable consequence of being put in a confusing situation after spending the last few minutes frantically trying to do all of the right emergency-response actions while certain she was going to die. 

"...I didn't see how I got here, no. From my perspective it was just a discontinuity. And I - seem to not be injured? Which is weird since I do remember the crash hurting - I thought maybe it was a nightmare but usually I don't remember dreams this clearly after the fact, and also I'm decent at lucid dreaming and if I get as far as thinking to check if I'm dreaming that almost always works and I'm sure I did try that. ...Anyway, no, I don't know this location and it doesn't look very much like anywhere I would recognize." 

Élie really wishes he had Tongues. He pantomimes blindfolding himself. Does that work?