"- Um, I definitely wasn't blindfolded before the plane crash? Or at any point that I remember? If that's what you're asking. I'm not sure why you're trying to point at words in my flashcards to talk to me - but you seem to understand me when I say things out loud, so–"

Pause. Right. Merrin is confused about more things than her method of arrival here, and the kid seems to be able to understand her, and he's currently letting her talk. 

"- Um, you seemed really scared of me when I first got here? I'm - not used to anyone being scared of me and I wasn't expecting it and I figure the reason for that is another thing I'm missing." 

....okay he's just going to blindfold her. 

Ohhhhhh, was he - asking her for permission to cover her eyes so she wouldn't see this location? ...Some other location, presumably, she already had plenty of opportunity to see this one. Not that she took much advantage of it, and also it has relatively few distinguishing features. 

Merrin still has very little idea what's going on, but in almost all of the possible scenarios, fighting this wouldn't help even if she could succeed at it, so she doesn't. 

In that case, she's going to be led through a confusing series of tunnels until she has no idea where she started or which direction she's going in or even which way is up. 

When the blindfold is removed, she's tied to a chair in a wine cellar. Élie's there, along with a middle aged couple. He bows slightly; a native Galtan would parse it as ironic but Merrin probably won't. "Merrin, Jean-Claude and Gabrielle; Jean-Claude and Gabrielle, Merrin." 

This has gone so far beyond 'the weirdest thing ever to happen to her' that Merrin's emotions were left behind a while ago. 

...Also this isn't even the first time in Merrin's life that she's been tied to a chair, specifically, though the other occasions were much more romantic and more something she had agreed to in advance. She has no mental scripts for this! Work or social or otherwise! It's kind of ridiculous for the social awkwardness of this situation to be more upsetting than - anything else about this situation - but, there you have it. 

"- Hi?" she says, and she's tense enough that her voice is kind of squeaky which is also embarrassing and she hasn't felt this embarrassed since she was seventeen. "Um. I'm still not sure what the constraints on communication are, and I'm also getting the sense that maybe none of you know what's going on either, but I'm really confused. ...I am not here to be a threat to any of you. In case that wasn't just obvious." 

"She says she's confused and doesn't intend to be a threat to us," he dutifully repeats in Taldane. And then, to the couple – "You may as well do it now." 

         "How do you intend to question her, pantomime?" 

"If you'd rather wait until the morning, of course – " 

          "Or we could just kill her now, like sensible people." 

"If she's a spy, they're trying something so utterly bizarre we can't afford not to figure it out, they have capabilities we never even guessed at – "

          "Don't be a child. You think she'll talk?" 

                     "I don't want that woman in my home." 

          "Take it up with our young friend." 

"Some of us didn't want to wait thirty years for other people to start their revolution." 

           "You think you understand the secret police – "

 "I think none of us understand the half of what's happening right now." 

            "...."

            "I'll have my spells in eight hours." 

"Do you want to guess where we'll be in eight hours?" 

                     "She's not staying here." 

             "Have it your way." 

The older man turns to Merrin. "Zone of Truth."

Merrin watches the back and forth. Tries to glean as much as she can from the nonverbals. 

(She would probably be a lot more upset and scared if she were any less incredibly confused.)

The couple are older. Going off body language and facial expressions, they're - probably also higher in the chain of authority than the kid? They're frustrated, maybe.

And scared. Why is everyone apparently scared of her? This is terrible! 

- huh, that....felt like something? The older man said some words to her, or at least while looking at her and making eye contact, and she didn't understand the words but it somehow still felt like she was - receiving information that meant something. She's not sure what the information is. It feels like it might be communication-related but that's - in some sense easily inferable given that he conveyed it to her by speaking out loud? 

They're still scared, she thinks. For some reason that she doesn't understand and that makes no sense but that doesn't make it matter less. 

Merrin tries to make eye contact and look as harmless as possible, and waits. 

"Do – you – know – of – Cheliax." The last word is spoken.

Merrin, again, listens intently. 

"...Um, no, I don't recognize that word. 'Cheliax'? Is that an - object? A place? A person?" 

He translates. The woman responds. "That doesn't prove anything. They use unwitting agents. We use unwitting agents." 

Élie turns back to Merrin. "Have – you – been – before – Golarion?" 

They continue to seem really hostile! Merrin, despite her best efforts, is getting kind of freaked out!

If this is a training scenario where they gave her amnesia on purpose then - even aside from her uncertainty about whether that's possible and/or a standard practice for advanced Exception Handling training - she feels like, if it's that, she's going to be really mad at someone about this after? Which wouldn't be helpful toward anyone's goals, here, and that would be a predictable fact about Merrin to anyone smarter than Merrin, so she wouldn't have thought they would do it at all? 

"- Um, Golarion is the - planet that you showed me the map of earlier? I didn't recognize the map. I've never been to a planet other than dath ilan, the one I live on, and I didn't know there were other inhabited planets and I definitely didn't know of a way I could end up on one of them by accident." 

Of course, she could have made her save. This would be easier if they had a cleric of Abadar. But he can  do due diligence. "You – say – not – true – thing." That one's not a question. 

The pointing-at-words communication method is terrible. Merrin can't tell whether he's accusing her of saying something untrue or asking her to say something untrue on purpose? ...His expression maaaaybe looks more questioning than angry, which is - possibly - information. 

"Um, I might be misinterpreting but if you're requesting that I say something that isn't true -" wow this feels like it shouldn't be nearly so hard to think of, but she keeps only thinking of true things where the opposite isn't something she can easily communicate in a sentence, "I was–" 

And she had meant to say 'born in Last Resort', which would be obviously false and absurd to anyone in dath ilan even if they didn't know Merrin personally, but she - can't - what - 

Merrin is making such a confused and indignant expression right now. 

           "All you've proven is that the spy can act." 

"Can you think of one mortal reason why she'd be acting like this?" 

           "So King's spymasters thought of something I can't. Tell the truth. Did you bring her here because you didn't want to kill her yourself?" His voice gets a little softer. "There's no shame in that. You don't have to get  used to killing so quickly. You'll have plenty of time." 

  "No." Élie brandishes the e-reader. "Look. Have you ever in your life seen anything like this? If she's a spy, it means that Cheliax has access to technology beyond our imagination, or to magic that doesn't look like magic, maybe there's some secret internal research project or they really did make contact with aliens or they're playing a completely different game than we thought they were, either way, we're screwed. And that's not even what matters, is it, because you know perfectly well we were screwed to begin with. Let's say we take the palace, and hold the palace, and enough of us survive to put up some kind of a front when Infrexus come to his senses and sends another couple hundred combat wizards to Isarn. It will take a miracle for us to win. And if she really is an alien, we might just have been handed one. Her planet has machines that fly. Imagine if we had those, we wouldn't be trying to secure a border with four teleporters. Look at her books. They have pills that cure consumption, they can replace missing limbs without magic. What else does she know? What else would we be giving up?"  

            "...."

                 "...."

The woman responds first.  "You stay with her tonight. If she does anything – I mean it, if she blinks in a way that looks mildly suspicious – " 

"I'll kill her. I swear. I'll even take care of the body." 

          "And you'd better not get any blood in my good '89 Caladoc." 

That seems to break the tension. Élie laughs. "On my honor as a citizen of Galt."  

          "And don't drink it, either." 

"Gabrielle! What do you take me for?" 

          "A child who never learned to listen to his elders. Good night, Élie." 

"Good-night. Do try live 'till tomorrow morning." 

If this is a training scenario then Merrin hates everything about her entire life right now and she's going to be submitting some official complaints to Governance. 

If it's not a training scenario - which is, honestly, seeming more and more likely - then -

- then on some level that's a lot worse, right, but also it's a lot harder to be upset or angry about, somehow. Because instead she's confused. And then curious. And - (this is an objectively ridiculous attitude to bring here, but it feels like it fits with all of the other ways in which Merrin is weird as a person) - and it feels simpler, somehow, that twenty subjective minutes ago she had expected to die the true death and never have any experiences again. And now she's here. And it's objectively a scary situation but - what's the worst that can happen? They attack her with a knife, or something, and maybe she dies but she had thought that was guaranteed less than an hour ago, and maybe she doesn't die. And right now they don't, actually, seem like they're about to try to kill her. 

She watches their faces and their body language and tries to infer as much as she can from it, which isn't really that much even though she's well above median for this skill among dath ilanis. She is quietly frustrated and also confused about what language they're even speaking - she doesn't personally know any conlangs properly, or anything, but it feels like she'd recognize the sound of one and this is more alien - and she holds still, and waits for further prompting. 

The older couple leaves. Élie unties Merrin from the chair. He reaches into his bag and pulls out half a loaf of bread, some hard cheese, and, incongruously, an irate live magpie. (If Merrin didn't know better, she'd swear it was swearing). He offers the food to Merrin, and then produces some kind of dried fruit for the bird. 

It's a bird! Chirping in ways that sound like words and eating dried fruit! Adorable! 

- also a minor side point that changes nothing about Merrin's actual situation. 

She smiles at the kid and accepts the - food-items? she's not totally sure what they are but they at least resemble food? - from the kid, and takes a nibble. ...Sure. That's food. Entirely edible. Not even the worst-tasting thing she's eaten. 

She chews and swallows and looks over at him again. "Can you still understand me?" 

He shakes his head. (That was his second Comprehend Languages, and it wore off a couple minutes ago). 

If Merrin had been planning better she would have tried to confirm what his constraints were on understanding her while he definitely still understood her! She wasn't, though. Which isn't, in itself, even very interesting to note - sure, if she had another ten years of training in the same general direction that her past training was pointed in, she would have handled this better, but it doesn't seem that compelling that she could counterfactually have made a different and much better choice here, with the skill she has now. She could have been pushier, but all her social instincts were yelling that this would go badly, and so she didn't, and she has super not been murdered with a knife yet which seems like a success here. Tentatively. 

(Hopefully this will turn out to have been a psychotic break hallucination the whole time.) 

The kid's bird continues to be really cute, and Merrin is having a TERRIBLE DAY and needs distractions. She makes a chirping noise at the bird and offers it a bit of her bread. 

The bird looks at her indignantly and says, quite distinctly, "I do have a name, you know." 

Élie taps it on the beak. "Give her a break, she doesn't speak the language." 

Merrin does not understand the words spoken but she can read subtext at all. Oh no, she somehow managed to be socially awkward in an interaction with a BIRD???

...Which can talk, which makes it both less unlike being socially awkward with another human, and also probably more likely that this is hallucination, but STILL. 

She...is going to go on offering bits of bread to the bird in between eating it herself, but not make further chirping noises. 

...yeah, he'll go for the bread, he's hungry. But it's really the LEAST she could do. Chirping. Imagine.  

Élie points to the bird. "Félix." Come to think of it, he never gave Merrin his own name. He points to himself. "Julien Camille Élie Cotonnet. Élie." 

Merrin looks up, frowns slightly and then smiles. "Félix?" It's an odd phoneme but she can mostly get her mouth to do it. 

...The human teenager's probable-name, on the other hand, has so many syllables in it! None of them are individually that unpronounceable - at least, Merrin can manage basically all the consonants in a recognizable form, for some of the vowel intonations she can't entirely parse the sound let alone say it - but mainly the problem is that he just said, like, twelve syllables in a row and Merrin's working memory is below average. 

- maybe less than twelve, there was a repeat in there? 

"Elee?" she tries. No, almost but not quite right. She makes a face. "Ju-lee-enne Cam-[mumble] Elie?" 

That's pretty close! "Eh-lee." Personally, he thinks his name has a very respectable number of syllables. Some of his friends get up to fifteen or twenty.