(Agreed.)

They stop in a shop in Absalom and buy samples of 'diamonds' and 'spellsilver'. They'll be back later, when they can bring more gold, for an assortment of magic items (most notably, a headband of each mental stat), initially for testing.

(They do have gold, it being one of their top five guesses for what a society without the computing or social technology to do their accounting in metaphorical labor-hours might use as currency. The shopkeeper is baffled by the ingots but they are, in fact, made of Element-79.)

And then they can head back to Vigil, spend the night, spend most of the next day meeting with Lastwall's Governance, and then head back to dath ilan, the seventh-circle wizard who's been Teleporting them around and otherwise serving as their guide to Golarion in tow as an ambassador of sorts.

Their report to Exception Handling HQ includes the following requests:

1. One million tetrahedral Element-6 crystals of at least [this size].
2. One ton of any of Elements 57 through 71, it apparently not mattering which element specifically.
3. Ten endurance-focused Exception Handling personnel whose jobs involve facing some degree of real personal danger, who are cleared to swear high-grade secrecy oaths and willing to volunteer for an important mission potentially involving [various rather underspecified dangers].

??????????

You want to do WHAT to my best oppers??

... if you're going to be using my people for your weird-ass alien experiments, could you at least get Merrin one of those so-called 'intelligence headbands'?

It turns out that about two hours in a top-secret installation, forbidden to talk to anyone outside of it, is enough to make Merrin EXTREMELY SUPERHEATED BORED. Even the day after an intense sim-turned-definitely-not-a-sim like yesterday, Merrin is not so much used to downtime, per se. 

...Do they have a sim room here? Presumably they can't let her go do ridiculous outdoor rescues, but she can do ICU sims in the standard setup. Uh. If they can get access to some of the special libraries because honestly she has been through just about everything in the normal libraries at least once, and the really long interesting ones multiple times. 

The facility absolutely didn't have the sim equipment for a hospital Complicated Patient Intake Room setup yesterday. But it was pretty high up there among the predictions of what Merrin would ask for, and compared to the scale of this whole operation, it's really not a major expense to rush that setup so it's there by the time she's rested enough to ask for it. 

(Of course, no one is going to mention to Merrin that the room hasn't just always been here.) 

Given the fact that she's already quarantined for exposure to a grade-six infohazard, and is in fact pre-cleared to swear high-grade secrecy oaths, which they are planning to ask her to do for an even higher-stakes mission, it...seems fine to give her access to most of the secret library of Weird Exception Handling Medical Sims with minimal obfuscation. 

Does Merrin want to solo running an ICU on an "underground Moon base" with some casualties of an unspecified industrial accident? Does she want to triage and treat the victims of an unspecified bioattack? Does she want to run an "ICU" sim with three patients of varying levels of acuity in which she also cannot use literally any computer tech? (The last one can be run solo but doesn't have to be; Merrin can have some of her teammates on it, if they also feel like running horrible sims.) 

(Merrin's teammates mostly don't feel like running horrible sims, actually.) 

The no-computer-tech-ICU one is MEAN and UNFAIR and it lasts eight hours (...it's an extended version of the standard 4-hour sim, for Merrin specifically).

On the first run, literally none of Merrin's simulated patients survive! It's intensely frustrating! She has 'alternate fallback medical equipment' but she is learning how it works on the fly and also how non-computerized ICU equipment works is 'terribly', running vasopressors by gravity gives her panic attacks. Merrin is pretty sure that the only way she can possibly get through this sim is to coach her one conscious simulated-patient (played by an actor from the onsite team) on how to monitor her other patients. 

Merrin is going to run the full sim every day and spend her "downtime" on notes and prep and frantic research on reconstructions of pre-technological medicine. This is literally even meaner than her worst low-resource solo wilderness rescues, which mostly didn't give her critically ill or injured patients who wouldn't survive without ICU-level support, and, when they did, generally left her with at least comms tech! This wouldn't come up even for an EMP blast, some of the Exception Handling medical tech is specifically supposed to be shielded against that! 

Merrin has a PERSONAL GRUDGE against this sim, but if they give her three runs on it, she'll probably get to the point where she can consistently save one of her patients and at least manage successful cryo on the two who 'die'. 

(The vast majority of people who run this sim at all already have the context on why it might ever come up, and most of the rest figure it out somewhere in the process, especially if they do it more than once. There's a brief discussion on telling Merrin, but there is, actually, a preexisting policy on this: she'll be read in as soon as she has a need to know, and no sooner.)

Instead, shortly before she's due to start her third run, she gets a message saying that it is instead time for MAGIC TRAINING and could she please report to this location?

Aww, she had a whole new plan for this run! 

(Merrin honestly has more than enough hints by now that someone with the average thinkoomph of the “works for Exception Handling” pool, or even just has closer to the usual level of dath ilani curiosity and tendency to poke at puzzles, would either already have a background hypothesis or would have guessed in the first five minutes. But dath ilan doesn't exactly encourage poking at questions that might have infohazardous answers, and for someone like Merrin who has rather more innate 'tendency to obey authority', at least in the aspect of herself she inhabits while at work, that cognitive habit is sticky. She would understand, too, if she finds out later why they didn't tell her.) 

Magic training is neat too, though! Merrin will report to the location given! 

When she gets there, the room is empty except for the Keeper who's been interfacing with her for the past few days.

"The others will be here shortly," he says, "but there's something I wished to discuss with you first."

He points out a silver circlet-like object on the table beside him. (It is fairly obviously not a Keeper's circlet.) "This is a conceptualmagic artifact which enhances certain aspects of thinkoomph by an estimated 1.3 standarddeviations. It has been tested and appears to be quite safe, although we expect that extended use will make it unpleasant to remove. You do not have to use it if you don't want, but your superiors in Exception Handling insisted we make the offer."

Merrin stares at him. 

“That’s a thing?” 

There are probably Implications of that, to do with - whatever is going on with the other fantasy-setting world that has the alien magic - and she sort of doubts that, overall, they are comfortable implications.

Also she has weird feelings about it!

...She isn’t sure what exactly her feelings are. That...is apparently going to take some inconvenient introspection to figure out. 

"- Sorry, right. I, um, I'm - going to think about it for a minute or two." 

What are her weird feelings??? 

Well.

So the obvious thing is that her superiors think (reasonably, and correctly) that Merrin isn't smart enough for - whatever is ahead of them, here. She should - actually think about the details of what they told her, at some point?

(She sure does keep doing a mental blank around the details. She should at least try to recall the conversation that she had while still - if not exhausted, at least while her motivation system was still mostly calibrated to the life-or-death, second-by-second intensity of an intense sim that had suddenly become an even-more-intense not-sim...)

...A fantasy setting, but - an alien one, not something that dath ilani fantasy authors would actually write. One with basically-human-appearing inhabitants - though those initial appearances may be deceptive, both from fantasy tropes and given how Merrin's superiors directly specified that further information was pending...

Their alternatephysics apparently somehow literally work here, in the actual physical world that Merrin has spent her whole life in? She...had probably been given enough bits of information earlier to notice that, and a little after was directly informed of it, but - maybe had not quite internalized, before now, just how weird that is??

And they want her, specifically, working on this. Despite her general mediocrity at most things. But it makes sense, because– because gaining power within the other world's magic system more-or-less relies on someone pushing themselves to the limits of their endurance, whether mental or physical? And thanks to Merrin's current job, she already has lots of practice at the relevant mental motions -

- and also she happened to land nearby and is thereby already information-quarantined, so it's not like it costs them much, they can't assign her to anything else until this (whatever it is) is over, so the opportunity cost is low....

What if they could instead pick someone ELSE for this job, someone SMARTER and BETTER who could thereby obviously get even more benefit from the thinkoomph-enhancing magic they want to offer her

...Merrin does, in fact, have enough faith in Civilization to trust that they would have noticed if they had a better option.

- wow okay thinking about the fact that Civilization apparently doesn't have a better option is somehow an even worse thought what if instead she stops that and tries to do her job. 

Well. Clearly the situation is very high stakes, and - if they think Merrin is among the people who should be working on it then they're desperate - and that means the current state of things is pretty bad and scary and Merrin does not, in fact, super want to deal with that while still stupid. 

(Not that the offer they're making her will get her as far as "smart". But it will at least be an incremental improvement.) 

(Merrin is on some level aware that there are as many as several wrongthoughts in that whole chain, but see, it's a long complicated chain, and someone is asking her to make a decision right now, and her Exception Handling instincts point toward it being very rarely useful to go introspect on all of your stupid emotions before answering a straightforward question.) 

Merrin cannot manage an honest smile and this context, unlike the "treating very delirious patients" context, is not a good time to try a vaguely-dishonest smile, and so she doesn't. 

"...I think that makes a lot of sense." 

Merrin reaches out to pick up the circlet. 

(She isn't not freaking out about it, but Merrin has a lot of practice at handling internal panic and keeping it purely internal and epiphenomenal to most of her actual functioning and decisions and actions.) 

(Whether or not Merrin can have her internal freakout and keep it internal, it is presumably pretty obvious to the Keeper watching her.)