Her going guess is that it's something like a nonmagical headband for perfect memory, though all her guesses are probably entirely wrong because who even knows what high level adventuring looks like without magic.

She can pass items with Mage Hand but she can't restrain people with it, it doesn't exert enough force for that. She'll have to come back over to where the Keeper is and stand on their forearms again.

This is not exactly a standard medtech method for restraining people and it's odd that this woman apparently has so much practice with it but it's certainly effective. 

(The Keeper is not nearly as comfortable with this procedure as Merrin would be. She knows how to tell if things are going right, and Merrin thinks out loud when she's working and did flag "do not put the tube down the esophagus", but it's not that hard to avoid doing that by accident, there's a camera on the end of the scope for it. There are, of course, predictably a huge space of unknown-unknowns-to her Things That Could Go Wrong, and so her backup plan for if things do not appear to be going right is to abort the procedure - none of these patients are about to stop breathing, and they're doing it with minimal sedation - and flag to Merrin that she needs to swing back here.) 

This is taking a lot of concentration and she's not especially modeling Carissa in any more detail than "how to communicate effectively with the alien, given the information they at this point have", which should hopefully be better soon, now that they have actual camera footage on the scene and people in control rooms all over the planet paying attention to it. 

Elsewhere, someone is in fact watching with rather a lot of interest. 

(Khemeth did spare some attention for Merrin, at the start, because these are not optimal Merrin work conditions. Merrin seems to be performing entirely adequately, though, albeit in the sort of weird neurodivergent Merrin headspace where it's actually kind of difficult for Khemeth to model her emotional responses to things.) 

The alien alternatephysics magic user is also far more important than whether Merrin is working at 5% lower efficiency than she would usually. 

The first thing: it's hard to read her emotional reactions. She's very controlled, in a way that most dath ilanis don't even attempt, let alone succeed at. If she's feeling upset about the deeply upsetting situation all around her - if she felt anything about a man bleeding out in front of her after Irris tried and failed a last-ditch improvised surgery to save him - it doesn't show. 

She's not even sparing worried glances for the kids. (None of whom are critically injured, anymore, but crying bleeding children are still pretty upsetting for most dath ilanis.) 

She's pretty competent at restraining people, if perhaps not in a way optimized to avoid injuring them; Merrin would do it as effectively and more gently. Her way works, but sure does not look like something learned in a medical context (and doesn't really look like something learned in an infohazardous sex life context either.) This too doesn't seem to bother her at all. 

- she's scared. Not just nervous, not just in a confusing stressful situation of uncertainty, but scared. That does show, though she's clearly going to a lot of effort to conceal it, and most dath ilanis who are not Khemeth wouldn't pick up on it. She's scared in a visceral way – of something happening to her, not of deaths happening around her. 

She certainly seems to have some kind of training for emergency situations, though, because despite being clearly terrified of something, she's externally calm and focused. She has excellent situational awareness, perhaps in some ways better than Merrin's. For the most part she follows instructions immediately and unhesitatingly, despite the conceptual and cultural gulf clearly left uncrossed by her translation magic. He suspects that she's paying quite a lot of attention to this, both to executing instructions correctly and to - something else, some other social goal. It's taking some poking to figure it out. She's...deferent, obedient, but not in a way that quite rings as familiar.

It's maybe closer to Merrin's social anxiety than to the average dath ilani following emergency orders. There's a hint of evading a threat, that wouldn't make sense in context unless it's the people she feels threatened by, and the threat is, what, upsetting people? saying thoughtless things that hurt people's feelings? - but it's not the same as that, it's skew in some other direction. 

She's paying a lot of attention to the people around her. Particularly Merrin, when she arrived, and the Keeper. She was closely watching how everyone else reacted to Merrin's arrival; she's also doing this to some extent with the Keeper. She was clearly trying to read something into it, something that felt was very important to her - to her, on a visceral level, not just to the prognosis of all the injured and dying around her. Maybe to something as basic and fundamental as food or shelter or physical safety. He would guess that she's unusually low-empathy - not zero empathy, he heard descriptions of some of her earlier reactions including directly from Irris, and transmitted voice recordings are better than nothing for analysis.

She offered immediately to try to save people. When she made the request that they – try to contact an extradimensional entity called Asmodeus? they really need a followup conversation on that as soon as things. stop. happening. so. fast. – several people including the Keeper on board thought that there was some sort of strong emotion there. That, faced with nearly a hundred doomed strangers on an alien world, she was motivated to save them well before she had any way of knowing how much she would be paid for it. 

(The Keeper also suspects that she has some sort of specific cognitive-skills training, in addition to her obvious degree of experience in Something Which Isn't Exception Handling. Sometimes she closes her eyes, appears to concentrate, and then is simultaneously more relaxed and more determined.) 

The fear is pretty distracting! His mental model of her doesn't have enough moving parts, yet, to entirely pin it down, so it's just THERE and LOUD. This is one of the downsides of Khemeth's method of getting inside people's heads, as compared to the training that Keepers have. 

....So what does this, set alongside other snippets they've heard, imply about the world she came from? 

She comes from a world where there are non-cryopreservation alternatives to True Death, and - the sorts of entities it would even conceptually make sense to try to contact-or-something from another world for help - and a pretty wide range of economicmagic and conceptualmagic, though they don't have enough of a grasp of what alternatephysics underlies her 'spells' to guess at which other spells exist. 

She's obviously fairly intelligent - actually a bit higher than dath ilan median on raw thinkoomph, he would venture - but seems confused at a number of Baseline constructions. She has a ??doompunk?? healing spell. The Keeper thought she had some sort of reaction to the offer of payment, one that wasn't just "I have no idea how your world's currency works." 

Suppose he runs with the maybe-wrong assumption that her fear level is based on how her world works, and learned priors from that, not just her uncertainty about dath ilan. Taken at face value, that implies she comes from a dangerous world. (Or has contact with another society that's dangerous, or knows a group that's dangerous, or maybe had heard of other worlds and that they were dangerous...) But somewhere her flavor of vigilance would be adaptive, or at least a predictable prior for someone to form even if it didn't necessarily help them survive, so - dangerous socially, but to the point that she's worried about physical safety. Which implies a world where a breakdown of Coordination to the point of interpersonal violence is - not even just an occasional rare disaster, but something that could happen unforewarned, something you need to maintain situational awareness for to the same degree that Merrin maintains situational awareness of patient vital signs. 

(Of course, maybe it's not that at all. He can try to flag hypotheses and then guess at probability weightings, though in the moment he's mostly generating impressions as fast as he can, tossing numbers at them, and passing them on to the larger team working on this.) 

- this is not really enough to go on to sketch even much of an outline of her world of origin (or whatever other factor here is relevant to how dath ilan will end up interacting with her), let alone to shape a plan for what to do about it, which is not really Khemeth's comparative advantage anyway. But Khemeth is documenting everything he observes, whether or not even he thinks it's relevant, and he isn't the only one doing the observing. 

Elsewhere, quite a large number of people are poring over extremely long lists of potential premises or facts about the magic user's world of origin, and trying to pare it down, noting which ones have probability mass squeezed away toward other premises once you update from their actual observations. 

(Different groups are working with different sets of said observations, or hearing them in a different order, to see if that results in different insights. Half of the Keepers are entirely causally screened from the situation, in case the other half get taken out by some kind of cognitohazard. They're being careful, while still trying to squeeze every bit of information they can out of simple observation, because not only can they not spare any time for questioning the new arrival until the immediate emergency is dealt with, it might matter a lot how they approach that conversation.) 

On the ground: 

Minutes pass. Nobody else dies.

The patient with the mystery lung problem is pretty close; even intubated and with assisted ventilation and 100% oxygen, his O2 saturation is in the 60s. There's indeed some sort of horrible ventilation-perfusion mismatch going on, almost certainly a pulmonary embolism of some kind. Given the number of long bone fractures, it could be a fat embolism – an unwanted glob of bone marrow, or maybe a lot of them given how there isn't a clear focal affected area, blocking off the arterial circulation to swaths of his lungs. Either way he's going to need extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as soon as possible. If there's bone marrow fat floating around in this patient's bloodstream - which they can check for sure with a more thorough suite of lab testing once the Exception Handling medicopter lands - then his brain is at risk as well, and they'll want to place a venous filter to try to prevent anything from his venous systemic circulation making it all the way through his heart and lungs and onward to his brain. 

The patient with the pneumothorax is in fact breathing better after Merrin releases the air from his pleural cavity. His heart rate is still climbing, now at 160, and his blood pressure is dropping, so there's probably a cardiac problem as well. The field ultrasound unit isn't great for doing procedures near the heart, and with vasopressors he's maintaining at least enough of a blood pressure to stay conscious. 

Vomiting-blood patient gets a breathing tube placed, because he's now out of it enough to be at risk of aspirating. The patient with the chest injury gets a blood transfusion, which should help his body transport some of the oxygen now being forced into his lungs. (He's still basically conscious, if groggy on painkillers and mild sedation; he's not very happy about this state of affairs, but with the limited degree of monitoring they have in this context, it's useful if any sudden neurological deterioration is obvious.) 

Nobody else deteriorates significantly. 

And then another flying machine comes screaming down out of the sky! 

It's not moving as fast as the plane was, and it has a very different design, with spinning rotors instead of rigid wings to generate lift. It has the advantage that it can apparently descend in a straight vertical line, touching down on a relatively flat area thirty meters away from the cockpit. 

A dozen medtechs spill out, uniformed and carrying equipment but definitely not wearing powered armor. They sprint towards the scene. 

She goes very still, and watches them carefully. Does this batch of people include ones whose job is plausibly Wizard Handling.

This helicopter was dispatched before they knew there was a wizard on the plane! Nobody on board has any particularly relevant training or experience for wizard handling! They're small town emergency medtechs who are at least basically certed for emergency cryo and on-site first aid! 

The team coordinator has been talking to someone from Exception Handling for the last thirty-five minutes, though, and is as ready as she's going to get to be the Short Term Alien Magic User Liaison! Given that no one on the second medicopter is super specced for this either, it seems better to keep her on until the arrival of the next Exception Handling team, one of specialists in things other than the medical, who have more of the equipment needed to set up a temporary hospital and base here in the wilderness.

(Inconveniently, Merrin is one of the people who has kind of a surprising degree of training in alien first contact scenarios, mostly just because Exception Handling sim writers sometimes get bored and "surprise: aliens!" is always a fun twist. Merrin is also way too busy to be on alien magic user liaison duty right now.) 

A woman in her mid-30s jogs up to the cockpit area, dodging rocks and casualties, and swings off her pack, which she offers to the Keeper. 

And then turns to look at Carissa. "My name is Farris. I don't think there was time before this for anyone to introduce themselves?" 

Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh the first faction of Carissa-handlers are here to decide if they gain if she lives   if she acts like an idiot then she deserves to die here in this horrible horrible place with no afterlives. 

Probably if they don't have magic then they can't do anything with her name but that doesn't mean it's not stupid, giving out your name in contexts where you don't know anything about the local rules. And it's possible that the reason no one introduced themselves beforehand was not that they've been very busy but that there are things that can be done with names, here. And it's possible that they'll make inferences about her from hearing Taldane spoken, though she did already speak the Taldane for Asmodeus's name. ...it's possible that if they confirm she speaks Taldane they'll be able to further infer which god she was speaking about, there. 

"You can call me Maartje," she says, after a half-second's hesitation. 

That's not her name. 80% confidence. 

(90% confidence is what Khemeth usually puts when something feels definitely absolutely right and also his sense of it is entirely opaque social intuition and he has no external confirmation to point at, because in those situations he's right about nine times in ten. He's downgrading it here because 'Maartje' is an alien.) 

Also, that question seemed - fraught, for her? Khemeth isn't sure quite what to read into that fractional pause, whatever he noticed in her careful lack of change in her expression, but it's something significant. And she's still scared. 

(Farris does not need to hear any of those observations in real time. She was already briefed that the magic user from another world is likely to be pretty tense - it's an overwhelming situation to be in regardless of specifics - and, while she clearly has some sort of Unspecified Training not entirely dissimilar to, say, Merrin's, and is unlikely to be incapacitatingly upset, she might be shaken. It was that sort of situation.) 

"We're unlikely to need anything urgent from you until the point when you can do more of the healing magic," she says. "Just to fill you in on the plan, it sounds like we're going to set up a field hospital on the site," and an alien/anomaly quarantine zone, "rather than move and evacuate all the patients. If you aren't tired, you could help carry heavy things and set up tents once that arrives - this isn't a specialized-high-value-use-of-your-expertise-and-training*, but may still be your comparative advantage, we have a shortage of able-bodied people and particularly able-bodied people who are not fully occupied with medical treatments. I'm certain that we will think of uses for the flexible-use spell that does heating and cooling and other things, and probably the light one and the manipulating-forces-from-a-distance one, but they're unlikely to be life-critical uses. And I'm aware that we never had a chance to ask what you were doing before this." And she heard a report that the woman arrived looking out of breath and like she had just been doing something high-exertion. "If you are tired and would benefit from rest, that would be relatively less disruptive now." 

*A three syllable word. 

Well. That's all very coherent and civilized and everything she says is information to people she knows nothing about but she also cannot afford for them to think she's going to be uncooperative. "What is your assessment of the security status of this location." Good language, it's fun to use in its clipped fast way if she's trying to say something she actually wants to say that way. 

...Interesting. That adds quite a few bits of update to the hypothesis that she's worried about threats to her safety. From what, though? 

Well. She is in a world that knows nothing about her world, and in fact until recently would have with high confidence said that her world didn't and couldn't exist, not in a way where it would interact with this part of Greater Reality. But they were apparently wrong about that! And, perhaps more to the point, not-Maartje cannot actually confidently know that dath ilan had before now heard nothing about her world, wherever and whatever it is.

Not-Maartje...knows really very little about dath ilan in general, actually? She is presumably bringing her own prior into this situation, but Khemeth doesn't know what they are. She wouldn't come into this knowing anything about how dath ilan, specifically, runs Governance. Maybe her world has a strength-based dictatorship or a Unilateral Dictator; maybe it has one of a dozen things that Khemeth hasn't thought of yet. 

What has she actually observed? A crashing plane, and she doesn't know how much of an absurdly unlikely fluke that was. A reasonably organized if rather scrambled-improvisational response to it. Merrin's mother, who is certainly...a person...to be the first dath ilani anyone meets face to face, though it wasn't a long conversation by the sound of things. One of the top specialist Exception Handling endurance medtechs trained in Weird Situations, of which this is certainly one, airdropping out of the sky (which she was surprisingly underawed by, at least for the two seconds it took for Khemeth to remember that of course it wouldn't be impressive to her, she has a flying spell.) Some messy acts of desperate field surgery, which is, you know, not exactly showcasing dath ilan's medical competence at its best. A helicopter of small town medtechs, now arriving. 

If she can't read the numbers on Merrin's screens, the rapidly-updating prediction markets with liquidity usually associated with top global corporations, then she has very little indication of the scale and coordination of the worldwide response happening out of her sight. More to the point, she doesn't know the content of that response. Doesn't know if dath ilan intends to treat her as a hostile alien, regardless of how many people's True Lives she just saved. 

(And, well, they do in fact have an armed nuclear weapon pointed at her location. Just in case. It's probably not the response they need, but dath ilan, too, is operating in an information vacuum, making the best contingency-plans they can while the probability spread over possible future contingencies is scarcely narrowed down at all...) 

- that feels right. Not-Maartje is trying to do that, in her head, assessing all the new arrivals, everyone interacting with her, trying to figure out their goals and incentives and resources, and she does not by default assume that the answer to those questions is one that bodes well for her. If all the steps in what is really quite a long and unjustifiedly specific chain of hypotheses on his part are correct, she's plausibly worried about straight-up interpersonal violence. 

(Which has a "feels right" ring to it, but Khemeth is only going to put 60% on it, since it's running on quite a lot of assumptions.) 

That's...well, for one it's pretty upsetting, actually! Now Khemeth is trying on a more specific mental model of not-Maartje's fear, and it's unpleasant! It also gives him a doomy feeling about her world. Though of course it could be nothing to do with her world, and just in response to the sudden looming uncertainty of an impossible even having nonetheless happened. Dath ilan too is hoping for cooperation here and fully intending to try for it, and also readying other contingency-plans. 

(The Exception Handling staffperson gave Farris some scripts in her onboarding, and she's now getting an updated prompt via earbud.) 

"This was a catastrophic event even before you arrived," she says. "In expectation a lot more catastrophic. There was already a lot of secrecy-cleared worldwide attention on it. And - learning about another alternatephysics world, with economicmagic and conceptualmagic that works here, is - this is probably one of the most important things that could possibly happen. Getting resources and personnel physically to the site is slower; this is a remote area, that's why our team was the first aside from Merrin, and we were en route for almost forty-five minutes from the nearest city big enough to have a hospital. But the area is modeled as geologically stable, less than 1 in 20 odds on a landslide or other dangerous geological event, and Exception Handling will be here to secure the site further in maybe an hour. I could wish we had more medtechs and an entire hospital installation, but - I'm not worried about something going wrong that causes more injuries than the current ones, or anything." 

That has to be deliberately unhelpful, there's no way someone could be that unhelpful accidentally. Obviously when a person with world-altering magical powers shows up and people everywhere know about it the risk is not rockslides causing further injuries.

But she did go out of her way to say that the event attracted 'worldwide attention'. Perhaps that's as much indication as she's permitted to give that there are absolutely other factions at play, that 'we're remaining at this location' is meant to last only until someone comes by to change that - but why would she be permitted to give that much indication, why not reassure Carissa that very few people know the plane didn't crash with all aboard? Which would be threatening in its own way -- it'd be an obvious implication that the can make the plane have crashed with all aboard, if they need to. 

- that's it, probably. There's worldwide attention, which is to say, we couldn't get rid of you easily; everyone who acts will be acting in a fashion fairly transparent to everyone else.

Maaaybe they're putting together a sort of Worldwound treaty but it seems like too much to count on.  

"Exception Handling?" she says politely.

Okay, WHAT is she reading into that attempt at reassurance - it's not in fact the reassurance Khemeth would have given, but he's not on-scene and in fact absolutely should not go stick himself into the middle of the quarantine zone.

It's deeply frustrating how controlled not-Maartje's micro-expressions and body language are. He can definitely tell that she's having a reaction that she is trying to control, but she's good at that control, and given the complete absence of any other background information to piece together hypotheses at what she might be thinking, what he can read is really low fidelity.

She's...frustrated, maybe? Wanting some specific information, and that wasn't it? 

She has that explanation ready to go! It's a pretty reasonable and obvious question for an alien to have. 

"Exception Handling is the branch of Governance* that handles anomalies outside of what the ordinary regulations and hierarchy of management are designed to handle well. Like, well, planes crashing in the first place, and especially like your arrival. Exception Handling did a lot of the plan-proposals and workshopped the one we ended up using. The planet you're on is called by its inhabitants dath ilan; decisions about you will be ultimately routed to a Chief Executive, who is appointed by {chosen by people}^4** where the base level is the general population of the planet, 97% of whom over puberty participate in choosing."

Pause. 

"...Merrin, the one who airdropped in and was first on the scene, works for Exception Handling, and so do the next cohort of medtechs arriving." 

*Tongues helpfully provides some Connotations, including a very strong sense that Governance is a proper noun referring by definition to the single relevant government body. 

**This is a sentence construction that indicates four levels of recursion on elected groups going on to elect higher levels of representatives, in only a few syllables. 

Officially, this world or at least the parts of it you are allowed to see are united beneath one Chief Executive. Got it. 

Officially, the Chief Executive is chosen by the people. Got it. 

Exception Handling is the body of the government that carries out the Chief's (she mentally drops the 'executive', it's too long) orders in unusual situations, such as a bunch of important nobles being on a crashing airship (crashing by accident? probably not) and such as a person from another world showing up. Got it. 

Exception Handling is incoming -- they don't have Teleport, so presumably on more airships, but the Chief wouldn't have any reason to want his own peoples' airships to crash so they'll probably get here fine. "What's the Chief Executive's name, and how are they referred-to-by-office? It's Exception Handling that decided we would remain at this location rather than boarding further airships?" Makes sense, if the Chief didn't intend that this one crash and hasn't yet figured out why it did. "Has the Chief Executive indicated the position of Governance regarding persons from other worlds?"

She answers the middle question first because it's easiest. "Yes. This is in-scope for Exception Handling. I don't know if they had a specifically relevant and rehearsed contingency plan, they have a lot of those but this is very specific." 

Pause. 

"Welthorm [followed by a 10-digit number], 'Chief Executive of Civilization' or maybe I didn't understand the question. And - I haven't been told about any policies customized to you, because we don't know much about you, I expect Exception Handling is working on something based on the most similar prepared contingency and will do more of that once we have a chance to learn more about your world. I imagine - uh, personally imagine but-can't-commit-to that, I'm not a Very Serious Person and there will really soon, less-than-five-minutes, be someone with more direct comms to Very Serious people, and twenty or thirty minutes after that there'll be someone from Exception Handling on-site who can answer more of your questions. But I imagine the basic theory is to buy everything you know - for really quite a lot of labor-hours, I don't know if it's more than saving almost 100 True Lives but it could be - and then see if we can figure out how to reach other worlds that are safe to trade with and trade with them?"

Another pause, because she's listening to a prompt from the Exception Handling admin via her earbud. "- Clarification on how many minutes of translation conceptualmagic you have left, and that your other conceptualmagics for it won't let you speak only understand?" 

Those are vaguely sensible questions, though Khemeth isn't sure what she expected the answer to "referred-to-by-office?" would be, if not "Chief Executive". He is mentally toying around with several different possible sets of unjustified assumptions to see what that gets him, marking them mentally (and explicitly in his notes) as incredibly tentative and probably wrong. 

How Lawful Neutral of them. If it's real, it could be a lot worse. 

(They've had HOW many of this dynasty? That has to be an exaggeration, right??)

"I have twenty minutes remaining of Tongues, and then another sixty minutes of Comprehend Languages. After that I won't have magic until morning, and -

- I don't know enough about your civilization to know if I want to teach you my magic. There isn't much I'd need another two hundred million laborer-hours for, and the things I might want are sensitive and I'd need substantially more assurance of your Lawfulness to even propose negotiations regarding them." Deep breath." "I am reluctant to prepare spells in the expectation my activities will be observed and used to attempt to infer magic, so I do not have a strong expectation I will have spells tomorrow or in the foreseeable future."

(She almost certainly can't actually stick to it. Without the ability to understand what's going on something bad would definitely happen very quickly. But, if you're in a position of safety from immediate death, you try a little bit of defiance, to see how they take it. If they're really Lawful Neutral, or intent to keep pretending so, they have to play along, here. If they don't -

- better to know.)

Khemeth cannot say this was high among his predictions of what not-Maartje was going to say next! Though they did have some other contingencies that involved 'the magic user no longer gets any more magic after today', and this is after all why they are having this conversation before the translation conceptualmagic runs out, even if that means a medtech who is not doing medicine while there is really quite a lot of medicine that needs doing. They can flip the conversation onto a new branch of the possible-conversations protocol sketched out over the last forty minutes. 

...It's interesting. It - sort of makes him like her more? It's not exactly the same sort of thing as how Merrin's social anxiety entirely switches off after enough hours of frantic emergency work, and it's - clearly a social maneuver - whereas Merrin's entire thing is that at some point you can exhaust her to the point that she STOPS doing social maneuvers vaguely aimed at some sense of safety that exists mostly in her own head. But there is still an echo of familiarity there.