....Moving on to the non-stupid or at least less-stupid thoughts about this:

What???????? 

Dear Merrin's brain: that still wasn't a non-stupid thought. 

Right. She is focused. She is definitely not distracted by the fact that her patient is NAKED and REALLY HOT in front of her.

Actually-medically-relevant thoughts in her queue:

- Yep she sure had noticed that the patient seems to be anomalously resilient!!! (Her team is great, and basic vital sign measures are already going up on the screens. The most recent blood pressure is - well, it's admittedly at the low end of normal, but it's still within the normal range! And they now have an actual O2 sat reading, which is also still within the normal range, though this is surprisingly and implausible enough that they're tossing an oxygen mask on her anyway, good.)

- The patient is apparently not an alien. Honestly, the surrounding circumstances are weird enough that Merrin is not really blaming herself for making that assumption, though. 

- They are apparently willing to risk various degrees of damage but not severe brain damage? ...Which means that Merrin really desperately wants her EEG sensor data like RIGHT NOW, and a brain CT scan from the portable medicopter unit in the next 60 seconds (...along with a full-body scan, since the patient sure does have a lot of horrifying injuries and it would be great to know more about the non-directly-visible parts, what if she's bleeding out internally or something -) 

....Also the patient is apparently, uh, dangerous? But for secret reasons, which is frustratingly unspecified! Merrin has certs for dealing with patients who are dangerous in normal ways, such as 'having a psychotic break, suddenly convinced that they need to by any means stop her from destroying Civilization which she is definitely about to do, and are also twice her size'.

Merrin is super not certed to handle dangerous patients when the danger is, itself, an UNSPECIFIED SECRET. 

- they did include actual clear instructions for that, though. Keep the patient unconscious. Well. The obvious solution is to induce anesthesia, intubate the patient and put her on a ventilator - which would be medically indicated ANYWAY given the HORRIFYING BROKEN RIBS if not for, uh, the fact that her oxygenation is apparently somehow still fine....

Anyway Merrin is noting a concern that the patient's apparent resilience to massive bleeding and punctured lungs might, in fact, correlate with similar resistance to sedatives? For all the obvious reasons, she does not love the idea of just giving the patient 10x the usual dose of sedatives, but, uh. She also doesn't want unspecified extreme danger to happen to anyone else? It's actually fine if it happens to her

Merrin spends 20 seconds or so waiting for the markets to give her a non-stupid treatment plan before remembering that, in fact, this situation is ridiculous and one of the ways in which it is ridiculous is that she doesn't have her usual, taken-for-granted medical prediction markets. Terrible. The handful of experts apparently read in on this case are, presumably, much smarter than her, but they're also still catching up. 

- so apparently if she wants decisions to happen fast, they need to be made by her, even though that's ridiculous. 

(it's not as though the rest of the situation isn't already ridiculous)

...All right, they're going to put this patient on a ventilator and keep ramping up the sedation (and painkillers, she has like twenty broken bones) until they either hit the literal maximum dose that their machines can administer, or her vital signs start to drop. Probably the second thing will be the limiting factor. Merrin is less sure of that than she would prefer. 

Yeah okay. Merrin's team is super weirded out by this whole situation, but they trust her and they will do that???

(The Crown of Infernal Majesty is an item of poison immunity among its frankly ridiculous number of other functions. Sedatives administered nonconsensually not only have no effect, they also—just disappear from her bloodstream? If anyone is measuring the concentration of drugs in her blood, it isn't going up.)

(Nobody is measuring the concentration of drugs in her bloodstream. In an actual hospital facility, they might, but the medicopter sensors are more limited.)

From Merrin's perspective: the patient's bleeding is now stopped! Scans sure show a lot of broken bones (which they're going to splint or otherwise stabilize as well as they can, while in transit) but she is not bleeding out internally or anything.

Oxygenation numbers are....totally fine, on literally room-air-O2-concentration and minimal pressure support from the ventilator. Rapid-test lab values are trickling in now and are...also basically fine?

(Merrin makes the call to give the patient some IV fluids and a blood transfusion anyway– uh, once they use the rapid-lab-test equipment to get all the details of her blood type, because she is apparently 'physiologically human' and not an alien but she's clearly a really weird human.) 

The patient's vital signs in fact don't change at all as they ramp up the sedative and painkillers to the maximum dose??? 

...Merrin is suspicious! And not sure what to be suspicious of! And she can't even query the wisdom of the medical prediction markets, just....register her suspicion and confusion with the handful of experts watching this. 

And then, well, she'll sit very close to the patient, watching her closely, and holding her still-limp hand definitely just because then she can keep her finger on the patient's radial pulse, why would there be any other reason

Expert recommendation: take a blood sample and then quit the sedation; it clearly isn't doing anything. Also, where are they on having any idea what's going on in the patient's brain? In addition to the EEG and CT scan, start preparing the brain-damage-byproduct sensor protocol, if they aren't already.

A few of the panel drop off screen to privately debate whether they should be advising someone to prepare to preemptively remove the patient's head if she starts looking too awake, given that she's shown herself both able and potentially willing to kill everyone on that medicopter with a thought.

(Abrogail does not have the material components for another Circle of Death and isn't going to start a fight while in an active flying machine anyway, she isn't stupid, but if she were able to hear that she'd definitely appreciate how afraid of her they are anyway.)

(This planet is doomed.)

Meanwhile, somewhere else, Exception Handling HQ is itself in a general state of Meta-Exception, because apparently dath ilan's most important and secret installation, which half of them didn't even know EXISTED before today and still aren't cleared to know ANYTHING about, got INVADED by WIZARDS from ANOTHER UNIVERSE. And now there's another alarm because someone just SPONTANEOUSLY APPEARED in a self-isolation chamber claiming (and appearing to all biometric scanners) to be Athpechya, which would normally be sufficient to establish her identity except for the part where earlier today she got KIDNAPPED AND REPLACED(?) by an EVIL WIZARD* VERSION OF HERSELF from the other universe, and then keyed in codes for a bunch of ADDITIONAL Exceptions apparently happening over there.

... okay, that has to be a software malfunction, right? That's, like, all the problems.

Can someone go, like, get her?

(*Dath ilan's knowledge of Golarion is not, at this point, advanced enough to tell the difference between arcane and divine magic.)

"... the hostile anomaly did WHAT and is now WHERE?!"

     "Yeah, Merrin's team ran into her on a training sim."

"While on the one hand that is probably objectively good, did anyone STOP TO CONSIDER that Merrin is now a GLOBAL CELEBRITY whom we now have to place under possibly INDEFINITE QUARANTINE without ANYBODY NOTICING?"

     "There's a million labor-hours in the prediction market for 'when Merrin burns out' and a lot of that is on 'soon'." (No one brings up the part where no one had any control over who found the anomaly because they know that wasn't Catchall's point.)

"I recognize that that strategy works for, like, programmers, but I am not sure it will work on a rank-five famous person. People will still wonder what she's up to."

     "We could fake some output for her. Say she's, like, writing an eleven-volume fantasy novel or something."

"... wait, what? Has she ever even shown any aptitude for fiction writing? [Implication: unlikely at her level of general intelligence.] And why eleven volumes specifically?"

     "... I honestly have no idea why I just said that."

"Nevermind. It was probably a joke you wouldn't understand."

(Why is his life LIKE THIS. Oh. Yeah. That's why.)

Uhhhhhhh that's super concerning!! Merrin is not a fan of patients who might just WAKE UP at ANY MOMENT even when they're not extremely dangerous for secret reasons!! In particular, this patient is hooked up to kind of a lot of equipment. Also the bleeding is mostly under control via application of direct pressure, but it'll need a full-on surgical intervention to actually repair the damaged artery, and the default protocol is not to do that in a moving helicopter. Though at least THIS one isn't in a storm. It's a rather calm and sunny winter day. 

They have EEG readings now (and Merrin's colleague is vacuuming hair from the floor before it gets into the equipment they're already setting out to place the brain-damage-byproduct sensor. CT image in two minutes and they'll transmit the file immediately once they have it. 

Merrin wishes to flag that, while she is certed for this, and even certed to do it in the air, it's a potentially high-risk procedure and she's been awake for a really long time, her vision is a little bit blurry. 95% odds she can do it without causing a serious complication that makes the damage much worse, but uh, checking that they in fact want her to take that risk. 

...Well, it's fairly critical information for their decision-making, it'll still be a while to the medical facility on the ground so they really can't wait until then, and the patient does also seem practically impossible to kill? 

OKAY FINE Merrin will do it. She is honestly actually too tired to feel especially stressed about it; she is just faintly irritated that her hands are shaky due to having taken way the fuck too many stimulants over the last eight hours. It takes her twice as long as it normally would.

Her brain is not producing any emotions about the possibility of the patient waking up and doing unspecified dangerous things to her. She is distantly peeved at the possibility that the patient might hurt her teammates, but mostly worried that the patient might, like, try to move or something and start bleeding uncontrollably again. 

...There you go, panel of secrecy-oathed medical experts, CT imagery now being transmitted over - last three minutes of EEG recording have been transmitted to them in real time - and they have the first readings coming in from the blood sensor. 

... that's a level of brain-damage byproducts that would not normally be associated with a living patient. Like, not even within an order of magnitude.

On the other hand, on the CT scan, her brain looks basically...fine? Like someone who suffered a pretty bad concussion and is going to be out for a little while, but nothing indicating serious permanent damage, never mind what you'd expect from a 600-foot fall off a cliff.

Oh, and it's getting...better? The first CT scan image is noticeably worse than the current one.

Uh, okay then.

Whatever anomalous process is somehow repairing the patient's brain (brains aren't supposed to be able to do that—where is it getting the information?), it appears to be slow enough that it's less than 20% likely the patient regains consciousness before they arrive at their destination. This prediction is qualified by the obvious fact that this patient is wildly out-of-distribution and the probability of the brain-repair process suddenly deciding to do something else entirely cannot really be estimated.

(In the background, someone—not Merrin, this isn't the sort of thing healthcare workers are supposed to do as a deontological principle—is told to very discreetly start readying the decapitation box from the emergency cryo setup for possible preemptive use.)

Current treatment plan: just keep her stable (she seems to be doing a fine job of that by herself, really), and watch the EEG readings very closely for any change, better or worse.

Well, uh, this should in some ways be less stressful than a patient who is not doing basically all the work of being stable on their own! 

...It's instead more stressful because Merrin has no idea how this patient WORKS, which means that her internal intuitive predictions are mostly returning ????, and also she doesn't have her superheated prediction markets, which is so unfair to have to deal with on this much accumulated sleep debt. 

(While other people may be worried that the mysterious brain-self-repair process will pick up speed and the patient will wake up on them, Merrin is worried that the process will stop working and the patient will PROBABLY INSTANTLY DIE because how the flaming sewage plant is that degree of obvious cell damage not setting off an inflammatory cascade of brain swelling - if the force preventing that stops working, it's not even clear if they'll have circulation for long enough to infuse cryoprotectants into her in the usual sequence.) 

Patient is also...not actually hypothermic at all, despite having been naked in the snow??? Do they, uh, want her and her team to cool the patient per one of the post-traumatic-brain-injury neuroprotective protocols? Merrin - is lowkey expecting that if they try it won't work, if the patient's neurological thermoregulation mechanisms are intact - which they probably are, because everything else seems to be working, she's even breathing spontaneously about the ventilator set rate. And they maybe can't actually sedate and paralyze her to prevent shivering thermogenesis. 

...They can try cooling the patient to 32 C, but abort if her temperature doesn't drop at the expected rate or she's visibly shivering, which would actually increase her overall metabolic rate and how much oxygen she's burning. 

Trying external cooling via the mattress and a cooling blanket over her, then. Also Merrin is making the call to give her another plasma transfusion because even if her blood pressure is literally normal, it can't be good for her to have lost that much blood volume. 

Crown of Infernal Majesty: +10 to cold resistance, which is sufficient for a reasonably fit person to lay in the snow naked basically indefinitely with no ill effects whatsoever.

So no, the cooling blanket is not having any effect.

(The Crown of Infernal Majesty is frankly kind of OP.)

So, by the way, they noticed this strange anomaly on the CT scan, and it wasn't the highest priority at the time, but could someone please check it out now? It looks kind of like the patient has a thin wire around her head.

Sure enough, there's an almost invisibly thin loop of metal wire around her head. It is utterly impossible to cut or remove.

Huh! The cooling is definitely not working, but - not in the way Merrin would have expected? She can't see any signs of increased metabolic rate and oxygen consumption that you would expect even just with non-shivering thermogenesis. The patient is just...immune to cold...somehow...? 

Mystery loop of metal wire is mysterious! Maybe it's some sort of advanced technology - or bizarre biology-affecting conceptualmagic, even - and it explains all the otherwise-inexplicable observations? 

...Well, it doesn't seem to be harming the patient, and figuring out what's going on is not Merrin's job right now. Merrin's job is - well, mostly just being ready to respond instantly if the patient's condition changes. 

She hovers and watches sensor data and updated scans and waits for their arrival at the mystery site. Hopefully it's a decently-equipped hospital? With someone on site who knows more about what's happening here???