(That seems really concerning???? Is being able to function while on fire, like, an expectation that her society has of magic users?????? Also nobody is ever allowed to mention this to Merrin because she's definitely competitive enough to request a sim where she has to treat patients while on fire, especially once she learns about the existence of magic healing even if it's for some reason doompunk-themed magic healing)

"Not anticipating fire pre-crash, can minimize fire risk post-crash by dumping fuel. Anticipate turbulence and sudden-changes-in-acceleration-over-all-planes*. Will assume that if well secured you can concentrate through that, moving-on-to-save-time-unless-you-interrupt-to-indicate-otherwise**."

There's a brief pause, no more than a second or two, while he waits to hear the next-highest-priority questions. 

"Can any of your spells be adapted to render and keep objects - or ideally a whole area like the pocket dimension - cold."

*Three-syllable word.

*One-syllable word. 

Carissa feels stupid, somehow, as if all of this is assuming she's a ninth circle wizard wearing the fanciest of headbands though obviously if she was she'd have fixed their stupid airship by now. It's like everything is crafted so that she can barely keep up with it and unpack it within the ten seconds she's allotted to answer it. 

Amazing how she can be bad at languages even with Tongues up. She does not like it. 

"Uh, Prestidigitation can chill a cup of water or an object of a similar size. I don't have...cold-based combat spells prepared..."

(Well, yes, Exception Handling is crafting every question to cover as much ground as possible, as fast as possible, on the assumption of "approximately median thinkoomph" because as of yet none of their observations contradict that, and they really don't have a lot of time. No dath ilani would feel stupid in a socially painful way about an emergency pushing them to their cognitive limits.) 

The man nods. 

"Might be sufficient. Would a head be close enough in size to a glass of water to be doable, and what temperature could you get it down to, and how long would that take." And then because Exception Handling apparently thinks it would be helpful for her to have the context on why they need to know this, "- if we can't design a plan that gets everyone out alive, but we can keep everyone else's heads undamaged and cooled until backup arrives on-site, we can probably ensure their brains are intact enough for cryopreservation."

(The last word doesn't directly correspond to any Golarion vocabulary. The connotation it matches closest is Flesh to Stone? There's a sense that, while it isn't a Resurrection, it...makes the person resurrectable in theory? When they would not otherwise be?) 

Carissa is very confused for a moment - what kind of resurrection specifically requires the cold head of the dead person - but most spells are kind of nonsense and she does not really have time to think -

- except they said, earlier, 'this is a true death situation', like they thought their souls would be destroyed, and things were moving too fast for her to think about but - "uh, clarification, what's the afterlife* situation here? I can probably use prestidigitation to make a head cold - if there's, uh, four minutes, that's forty Prestidigitations even if that's all I did -"

*this is NOT two syllables. It comes out 'alternatephysics where ontologically-basic-minds experience awakening on their body's destruction'. 

...just checking mentally, is there a shorter than that phrase for 'Hell' or 'the Boneyard' or 'Axis' or anything.

Not really! Baseline doesn’t have compound-word-phrases that would single out Axis or Heaven or Elysium or Abaddon or the Abyss or the Boneyard. She could coin a compound phrase - Tongues thinks that’s a thing you can just do, in this language - but would have to basically just describe the key details directly.

Tongues will suggest a couple of possible proper noun phrases that are vaguely close? For Nirvana, there is a fairly obscure children’s TV show in a fictional setting where you can cross through a portal into an idyllic wilderness alternatephysics setting and in the process be transformed into magical animals, but it doesn’t have the afterlife connotation (and, while Tongues is not going to unpack the plot of the show for her, the connotations definitely indicate that it’s fictional.)

A popular long-running web serial has a Plane Of Primordial Chaos that one might consider to resemble the Maelstrom, with the conceit that mind-souls both come from and return to it. 

And, for some reason, there is a compound-phrase that comes to mind immediately for Hell. The concept is considered heavily infohazardous; nobody on this plane (and just about no one outside the Basement) knows it, but it’s what nearly all Baseline speakers would converge on if Hell were described to them. It would translate approximately as “infohazard-infinite-torture-mind-experience-dimension”.

(Behind the scenes: Exception Handling needs a probability spread right now on how much airtime they can buy themselves via insane risky maneuvers, to decide if they can afford to workshop other plans that might keep everyone alive or if they need to pull the trigger on this one right superheated now.)

Well that's the wrong concept, Hell isn't eternal torture, it's just torture until you stop sucking. 

....so the crucial question is do these people not have afterlives or do they just because they don't have magic not know that they have afterlives. 

....if they have head-based resurrection they should at least know whether any heads went to an afterlife? 

Does Carissa get a normal afterlife if she dies here -

(Tongues cannot actually answer that for her. It can at best hint at the absence of an answer, by failing to provide any words that correspond exactly to her current situation.)

Piloting experts are looking at options for taking control of the plane’s remaining controls remotely, to execute a very difficult series of aerial maneuvers that random commercial airline pilots are really not certed on. 

Initial probability spread is back, albeit tentative.

“20% / 50% / 80% on remaining airtime 4 minutes 45 seconds, 5 minutes 25 seconds, 6 min 10 seconds,” the comms volunteer says very fast, in the manner of someone using a common, basic syntactic construction that he expects even the tiny child to follow without difficulty. 

(An overhead speaker announcement is being made, telling passengers to prepare themselves for a potential Plan which will be described in 30 seconds and initiated in 45 seconds if trigger conditions are met. Airline staff are frantically trying to repurpose food-storage crates to instead hold heads. They do have a basic cryo-initiation kit, for the unlikely case of an instantly-fatal medical emergency while flying over remote areas; they don’t have anyone trained to a high level on the full medical procedure, but they have the emergency decapitation kit, and that step should not actually take longer than the length of time Carissa needs for her field.)

“Tentative timeline 45 seconds for alternate planning,” the comms relay says tightly. “How would this interact with the plan for the Feather Fall and pocket dimension - what time interval do we need to reserve—”

Carissa is still not clear on what their plan is!! Or what the question is! She wouldn't even be sure it was directed at her except that she's being looked at expectantly! Also she has no idea what to make of the numbers being read with apparently nonmagical amplification!!! 

"Uh, I can't use Prestidigitation to freeze heads and cast other spells at the same time?" she says.

Blink blink. Right. The magic user from a fantasy setting is obviously not going to be used to emergency comms protocols.

“There are 96 people on this plane. We should have time to confirm-or-rule-out other plans but. If our best plan involves Feather Fall for five - six? do you need one on yourself or can you do the flying? - and eight in a pocket dimension and the remaining heads in crates,   so 82-83, how many seconds do you need to cast all of the relevant spells including the one for reflexes.”

Ah, see, formulated like that it's a question a normal person might ask if they were timing an attack. "I can cast Rope Trick Fly Haste Feather Fall in twenty-four seconds and only the timing of the last one needs to be precise. I don't need to be in the Feather Fall, I'll be flying, though if your crashing airship is crashing faster than 10 feet per second then I will swiftly get behind it once I've jumped out and the Feather Fall people should jump out approximately with me. I don't know exactly how fast I can freeze a head, I can try one now if you need something more precise than that -" 

…They are not actually ready to decapitate someone as a test, Exception Handling has several questions lined up to check possible alternate plans that get everyone to the ground alive. 

Irris can toss the comms relay her water bottle. 

Who offers it to Carissa. “We’ll measure the final temperature - will the effect be different on a larger object with different water content—”

(Exception Handling wants to flag that answering one of the magic user’s questions got dropped and it might be important.)

“—Jumping back, we have no knowledge of afterlives* and believe our physical laws are not compatible with ontologically basic mind-souls, and minds are fully destroyed when brains are.” 

(*The full Baseline phrase, said very fast.)

"Okay, another thing, some people here should be praying for Asmodeus to notice this place and fix that!!"

(She Prestidigitates the water bottle. It's dropping temperature by about 1 degree Celsius/second.)

To cool 82 heads in 3 minutes 30 seconds (reserving 24 seconds and a tiny margin of wiggle room for other spells), if Carissa can in fact only do one at a time, that’s 2.5 degrees of cooling.

(With fifteen seconds per, they can get the heads to within the temperature range actually recommended for delayed-initiation-of-full-cryo-protocol - this is where the 50% probability estimate lands on “enough to significantly decrease the damage occurring in the 25-30 minute interval before Merrin can start the cryo procedure”, assuming that the initial cooling is the only intervention done. But they could only get 14 of the heads in that time range.) 

They would get all of the heads anyway. Decapitating heads is not bottlenecked on the magic user, "heads packed in insulating crate" are much more portable than living people and much more likely to make it through a crash intact, and they can if necessary, probably, dedicate some of the space in the pocket dimension for heads instead of full-size living people. Even 30 minutes sitting around warm is probably not enough for full information-theoretic death of the brain in question; there will be huge amounts of damage, of course, far beyond the point where they could expect to get someone back via existing medical tech even if they weren't a decapitated head, but - they think - not enough to fully erase them as an individual, not permanently, not for the rest of the Future. And their magic user, who will be flying and thus uninjured, can hopefully continue on cooling them after the landing. 

- more relevantly though, the conversation ate 15 seconds of their precious countdown. And now their magic user is saying something incredibly baffling that might be important, and will also take way longer than 15 seconds to clarify! 

Message for comms relay: prioritize question to check feasibility of their top-ranked Alternate Plan #1.

“Coming back to that. Question one: can the pocket dimension be cast at a fixed reference point in the air rather than the plane body, if we open the ceiling hatch. Question two: would the weight limit on the rope be higher with a stronger rope.”

"Yes and no."

…Promising. Worth a few more seconds of workshopping, though they are at this point very, very aware that, if they don’t sort out a plan that saves everyone, fifteen seconds of delay may add up to an additional True Death.

(Exception Handling is doing some quick calculations on the probable approximate weight of ??domestic quadrupedal plow animals?? which are - probably at least four times the weight of humans? possibly a lot more but this is a safe-ish lower bound according to all the consensus of relevant experts? Which means that if the real weight limit is toward the higher end of the weight estimate given, they - should actually be able to support everyone, but not any of the plane, meaning no harnesses, no protection against sudden deceleration… But at the lower end, they might only be able to take, like, 4-10 people. And figuring out how to attach everyone to a 30 foot rope at all in four minutes is going to be cutting things pretty close.)

Followup questions are relayed within seconds.

“Further question, can it be cast on the reference frame of an object targetable by Feather Fall.”

Carissa is not sure she understands that question either! "Uh, I can't Feather Fall your whole airship, it's too big. I can Feather Fall something...twenty, thirty feet across, if you have one. The Rope Trick's going to use wherever the rope is when I start the spell for its frame of reference."