Personnel (a different staffmember, again, this one goes by Fellim but has not actually introduced herself by name to Merrin, who has enough to keep track of) thinks that seems reasonable. Merrin can do way harder things than this while somewhat distracted, and this part just is really boring. 

...That's a good idea, actually. Kalorm will find it orienting, if not necessarily reassuring, if he wakes up to the voices of his family members. Waking up to one's medtech having a completely unrelated conversation probably actually is reassuring, giving the impression that they're not desperately worried about him. 

Also, who knows, if he starts waking up enough to process the content of the conversation, it might get them ahead on Kalorm deciding that he approves of Merrin. 

He will not in fact be able to give Merrin his full attention. But he has a lot of attention, really quite a lot faster verbal processing speed than Merrin, and it's probably going to feel to her like the most enthralled someone has ever been by hearing her talk about her work. 

Merrin REALLY LIKES her job! Merrin could probably ramble about her most memorable sims for hours to a brick wall. Having someone listening to her with Khemeth's current impression of complete fascination would be a heady experience by itself even if she were describing watching ice melt in a glass of water. 

Kalorm is going to gradually drift to awareness to the sound of Merrin enthusiastically and with emphatic gestures recounting the time she had to spend like fourteen hours straight on a cave-diving rescue expedition, transporting variously terrified, "badly injured" and/or "unconscious" simulated casualties through a complicated completely-underwater tunnel network while managing their supplementary oxygen. And all of them were, in the sim scenario, untrained. (In actually fact the ones who were conscious and thus not simulated with mannikins were in fact highly trained Exception Handling staff who would not at any point have been in danger if Merrin had made a mistake.) 

And then there was an ""earthquake"" and her escape-route tunnel ""collapsed"". 

And she had to find a different route out and memorize all the turns because her underwater-navigation software ""had a software bug"". 

And then they simulated ALL OF HER LIGHTS GOING OUT BY SURPRISE. 

And THEN one of the simulated casualties got ""crushed by falling rocks"" and she had to SIMULATE SETTING UP FOR CRYOPRESERVATION WHILE TRAPPED IN A CAVE IN THE DARK. 

If the patient slowly regaining consciousness to this tale, while probably pretty confused and disoriented and not necessary entirely able to distinguish which events are really happening, were literally anyone except Kalorm, Khemeth would definitely be steering Merrin to talk about something less upsetting-to-normal-people. 

It's a pretty great story, though. Also wow this kid loves her job. 

(Merrin is of course a grown adult, but it's sort of hard not to think of her as a kid when she sounds like this.) 

Kalorm's EEG shifts to one that looks more like natural sleep, mostly theta waves with occasional 'sleep spindle' bursts of higher activity. He grimaces, sometimes gags on the tube and starts coughing and upsets the ventilator (though only Merrin has to actually listen to the alarm).

He looks increasingly uncomfortable, and squirms more, but doesn't appear to be in agonizing pain except for when he coughs. (Merrin tries upping the continuous dose of IV painkillers, but the amount it takes to keep him comfortable through coughing and being suctioned also completely knocks out his respiratory drive and drops his heart rate below 50 the rest of the time, so she settles on instead reacting quickly when he looks like he's about to start coughing and giving him a little extra bolus dose of a different very-fast-acting painkiller as needed, which mostly seems to work okay.) He makes a few not-very-determined grabs for his breathing tube with the non-broken arm, but doesn't keep fighting when Nerdel gently pushes his arm back down. 

His eyes drift open sometimes, not especially tracking anything yet or showing signs of recognition when his gaze slides past his mother's face. 

Even as distracted as she is, Merrin does notice when his eyes open and then stay that way, and this time it's accompanied by an actual shift in the EEG pattern to "plausibly awake." 

She cuts herself off mid-sentence of rambling about how it is really unreasonably hard to START A FIRE in a DAMP CAVE IN THE DARK because you are TRAPPED THERE UNTIL OUTSIDE HELP ARRIVES and your remaining non-cryopreserved patients are going to ""die of hypothermia"" otherwise and ""your chemical heat packs had a manufacturing defect"" which is just, what, why would that happen. 

"- Hey." She leans in, putting her face in his field of view. 

He tries to focus on her, and eventually makes a facial expression that isn't just 'involuntary grimace of pain.' He looks incredibly confused. 

That is so valid of him! From his perspective the situation must be so confusing! 

"There was an accident with your boat," she says, slowly and clearly and levelly. "You were badly hurt and you're at Default Hospital now." 

It does not look like this is resolving any of Kalorm's confusion. 

This is also pretty unsurprising. He plausibly doesn't remember anything about the incident, he might be having sensory or language-processing difficulties, and also he's still drugged enough to be very drowsy. Which is, at least, also drugged enough that he’s fairly calm. 

- she's not in fact sure if he's processing well enough to have any idea what she's saying, though she is pretty sure he's trying. Merrin reaches out and slides her hand into Kalorm's. "Think you can squeeze my hand?" 

THAT expression is a very sleepy irritated eye-roll. 

He does try to squeeze her hand, not very competently. 

Merrin has been warned not to praise him effusively for very simple things because he will probably settle on finding it annoying, but she does light up. 

"Your mother and your brother Khemeth are here," she says, again slowly and clearly-enunciated, and nudges Nerdel to move into Kalorm's field of view. 

Nerdel leans in. "It's okay. You're going to be okay. The whole family is here, you can see the others when you're ready -" 

Kalorm: still looks incredibly confused! He is now frowning and trying to mouth a word - maybe a word, the subvocalization throat microphone is not parsing it as anything other than a garbled noise - and looking blearily affronted when this doesn't work.

Merrin lowers her voice. "I think he's not processing very fast right now," she says to Nerdel. To Kalorm, louder, "Sorry, you aren't going to be able to talk right now. Do you need anything? You should be able to nod yes or no." 

Kalorm will do neither! He instead makes an obvious wrenching effort to drag himself more awake, manages a frustrated glare at Merrin, and more insistently tries to mouth words. 

"Do you want us to call in someone who can lip-read?" Merrin tries. 

Kalorm is possibly, at this point, way too frustrated to stop and actually try to parse what Merrin is saying. His breathing has also gone rapid and shallow, he's kind of fighting the ventilator, and his heart rate is skyrocketing. 

This is not going to cause a dangerous medical complication or anything at this point, but it's not ideal! 

Merrin hand-signals for everyone to be QUIET, because Kalorm is pretty clearly overwhelmed and asking him a lot of rapid-fire questions isn't helping. She gives him a little extra on the pain drugs, even though she doesn't think the main cause of his distress is that he's in physical pain. 

...gives him a dose of the IV beta blocker, because his heart rate is like 150 now and while this isn't likely to be medically dangerous, it isn't great for his heart, which quite recently had enormous bypass shunts in it. 

Now an even sleepier Kalorm is hyperventilating less but is still repeatedly mouthing something, over and over. It seems like a short phrase. Merrin cannot even slightly figure out what it is. 

She would call in the lipreading expert but Merrin sort of feels like having more people in his personal space is not going to help Kalorm calm down, and she's also not sure he's actually coherent enough right now for whatever he's trying to say to make sense. 

He is also definitely not calm or focused enough to even do gaze-tracking on a picture board. Time to...attempt trial and error guessing? 

"Kalorm. Listen to me. I want to figure out what's wrong and what you need, so I'm going to guess some things, and I want you to nod or shake your head if–" 

Frantically shaking his head! 

She hadn't even said anything yet!!! 

"Oh. Is it– do you have a question you want us to answer?" 

Nodding!!!