He doesn’t need to wait for Exception Handling to ask the obvious followup. “- So if we could detach part of the plane, you could cast Feather Fall on that and anyone who fit onto it?”

" - yes but they'll have a bad time because it'll stop moving fast when I cast Feather Fall and they won't. They might be all right if it's not moving very fast by then."

They’ll have less of a bad time than they would in an actual crash? Probably? The tentative plan would be to cram everyone into the cockpit area with every soft item in the plane for padding. There would definitely be serious injuries, but…more likely survivable for at least a few minutes. And anyone in a proper chair and protective harness should still be conscious and hopefully functional enough to triage and treat the worst injuries while they wait for Merrin. If there are deaths they can't prevent, their magic user will still be on hand to cool heads, and substantially less time-constrained. They might - very likely will - still lose people, but it’s much less likely to involve brain-destroying head trauma, or a fire that destroys the bodies before anyone reaches them 

And they have a list for the pocket dimension. Irris is on it. So is the four-year-old. The others are mostly selected by the market process. Names are being announced now.

It’s been forty seconds since the timeline was announced. They’re luckier than they might have been; the frantically jury-rigged remote-controls routed via radio alone are working, and the simulation shows the maneuver earning them another 4 minutes and 35 seconds (plus or minus 10 seconds) before they start to approach Feather Fall range of the ground. At which point they can use their limited remaining braking control, juuuuust before they trigger the explosives to sheer off the rest of the plane.

Remaining uncertainty: whether to cast the Rope Trick in the cockpit, or at a midair point where they can have some people hold onto the rope rather than risk the semi-controlled descent - but the timing on that maneuver will be vastly harder, and the tolerances here already aren’t incredible. 

Communication: inform their magic user that they’re going with “Feather Fall the cockpit, with the extradimensional pocket inside it” as their priority plan; possibly subject to modification, most likely modification would be casting Rope Trick in a stationary frame of reference rather than with the plane, but timing is obviously delicate and the people might need to be Feather Fall'd in order to avoid even more significant deceleration injuries; the main advantage it buys them is saving a few more people if something manages to go drastically wrong with the actual landing. 

The comms volunteer will relay a summary of the plan to Carissa. It takes ten seconds to cover in Baseline. It's very dense. 

"- Objections?" he checks. 

They're going to think she's an idiot. But - 

"- repeat that, or at least the parts of it I need to act on."

...Yeahhh, again, this person is not used to emergency communication protocols. It's still really hard to avoid doing it. Most dath ilanis have time-efficient emergency communication trained to a deeply instinctive level. 

"Default plan which we're 65% likely to use unaltered: we are going to move everyone, except you and the eight going in the pocket dimension, to the cockpit area with cushions and other items for padding over the next four minutes. On the most-likely plan, no action is necessary from you until around then. We will probably need you to cast the Rope Trick with about thirty seconds of lead time, to get everyone safely inside before the braking maneuver. We'll need you to cast the reflex-speeding spell on yourself, and ideally also the pilots, if you can do that; the plane is mostly being piloted remotely by more experienced expert pilots, but the radio link could fail, and we also need to time the explosives detonation very exactly. You'll need to cast Feather Fall on the area on our cue, and then probably Fly free of the area. We are 90% confident that we won't have more than 20 feet of error, and with everyone secured, it should actually be safer than the initial deceleration when you cast Feather Fall. We will give you a radio earpiece to stay in communication with the copilot; if no one in the cockpit is conscious, she," gesture at Irris, "will be in the pocket dimension with a radio link, which we assume won't work from there, but should again once it's safe for her to emerge. At that point we may need your healing spell while we wait for emergency medical assistance to reach us. Does that sound doable." 

It takes, like, five times as long. He's trying not to be upset about it. 

" - understood. I don't see why I can't do that." 

Carissa is tempted to ask whether she is entitled to some compensation for her trouble, here, but has decided not to ask, on the grounds that 1) they would probably just lie 2) the thing she wants, the thing she'd ask for if she were negotiating with Chelish people here, is permission to become a lich even if this is normally illegal and even though it will entail a lot of human sacrifice (she's happy to use old people and hand over the heads for freezing). And it seems bad to advertise to people that that's your life plan, even though it's the only viable life plan if you're on a STUPID PLANET THAT MAY NOT HAVE AFTERLIVES.

The markets are, in fact, figuring out what dath ilan thinks is the fair performance incentive for the service she's providing! It's going to be a really, really, really big number! She doesn't get full credit - a lot of people are contributing to this effort, likely making the difference between saving 14 people and (maybe, if they pull this off, if they do everything right and luck is on their side) saving everyone. But she still gets significant credit even for those additional 82 lives, since it wouldn't be possible without her at all. Call it 40% on those, and 90% on the 14 who she would very likely have gotten out even if Exception Handling had completely fallen down on the job. The weighted total there is still, like, 45 full lives saved. 

A million labor-hours is a lower bound on what Civilization will pay to avert one True Death, and that doesn't count the contributions from private contributors, of which there are KIND OF A LOT. The exact figures are still settling, but it could easily end up being more than five million per person, and Carissa will likely walk away with this with a bonus of well over 200 million labor-hours. 

They're going to tell her! Obviously! She isn't Merrin! Thankfully they only have the one Merrin! But they're not prioritizing telling her right now, while under so much time pressure to make decisions. 

Does she need any personal safety equipment set up to manage the Feather Fall safely?

...Actually, Exception Handling points out that if her healing spell is quick to cast, and she can follow the slowly-falling cockpit section for the approximately-30-seconds that Feather Fall will be in effect, she might be able to heal the worst of the injuries in that time period. What does she need for that spell and how long does it take - oh, and of course, how much of a monetary performance incentive does she want for the increased risk to herself. Their markets aren't actually sure how to assess said risk, since it sounded by implication like she's maybe more resilient to injury than humans normally are? 

"- I was not, especially, planning to do anything personally risky, what with how you apparently don't have afterlives? I can hit someone with the Doomiest Healing as soon as there's not shrapnel flying. That spell is touch range and takes three, four seconds to cast."

(There has to be an amount of money large enough that she would take it in exchange for a 0.001% risk of True Death, but "while in a crashing plane" is perhaps not the time to debate this.) 

"Touch range does make it more difficult," he acknowledges. "There isn't going to be a lot of space to move around. There shouldn't be any loose objects - everything will be well secured or staying in the rear section - and the design is very strong. We can alert you by radio how things look after the first deceleration." 

"Great. And if anyone's died, we decapitate them and ...freeze the heads? As soon as the plane's landed?"

"Yes. Not all the way to freezing - we need cryoprotectants and you aren't trained on the protocol - but if we can get them down to 5 C - 30 seconds of your spell unless the cooling effect is nonlinear - then they shouldn’t accumulate basically any damage before Exception Handling’s endurance emergency medical tech airdrops to us - should be 20-25 minutes after impact depending how well she controls the landing. She’ll be the first on the scene by a few minutes though, so it’s going to make a huge difference to have your magical healing available before that - how many times can you do it -“

"Only once."

…Less helpful than hoped, then. They’ll have to triage it very hard - and make the tradeoff on whether to heal the person most likely not to survive until Merrin’s arrival, or heal the most skilled and useful person to have on scene and ablebodied, even if they’re not at risk of True Death.

”But the cooling one has no limit, right?”

"Yeah, I can freeze every head if I need to - uh, I only carry a dagger and it's superheated" that's their swear word??? "difficult to decapitate someone with a dagger, have you got something better -"

(Some people have QUESTIONS about how she knows this!!! Combined with a few other worrying notes, it’s starting to sketch the vague unfinished outline of a picture that Exception Handling is not delighted about! It can join the growing list of accumulating Additional Questions to be addressed at some later time when they are not trying to save the passengers in a crashing plane and have only a little over three minutes to go before they pull the trigger on a very frantically improvised plan.)

“We have a specialized kit for it,” he says quietly. “I - we would train you on it, but it’s nontrivially complicated, and even if none of our personnel are in good enough shape to use it, Irris - the woman with the kid - is certed for it. We would just need you for the rest - we don’t have storage containers either, no room to spare, but we can maintain the cooling if you’re available to refresh the spell…”

"I don't understand what resurrection process it helps with but I'll freeze them if you want them frozen."

“We can explain it all later. It’s - not magic, it probably won’t much resemble a magical version if your world has one - does it - I assume you would have said if you had that spell even if you couldn’t use it today for this -”

"I'm not even close to powerful enough. Maybe someday, though if you don't have ontologically-basic-minds I don't know if it'd even work."

Well, five minutes ago he would have said that he didn’t think their basic laws of physics were compatible with using economicmagic to change the temperature of water let alone instantly alter the momentum of a heavy falling object or open a pocket dimension at the top of a rope! Who knows how things really work?? Not him!!!

A number of Very Serious People are certainly going to want to talk to their stranded alien magic user later. It’s not a priority for the immediate situation and it’s not his responsibility period.

He nods. “I’ll be here if you think of anything we forgot, and Exception Handling will be running prediction markets on alternate plans just in case we can make it safer.”

(And outcome predictions on injuries and deaths, though the situation is very far outside any existing simulated scenario and the bid-ask spreads on those markets are still wide despite the incredibly high liquidity.)

“We may not need much from you for two minutes or so, though. Make sure you’re firmly secured, we have emergency maneuvers scheduled in 90 seconds. …By the way, this is a limited-time-for-negotiation-situation, but you’re looking at at least 200 million labor-hours in monetary-compensation for this.”

Tongues makes it clear that this is a currency! It’s calibrated on an “unskilled” person’s work in an hour, but connotations hint that this may perhaps not be that equivalent to the productivity of an unskilled worker in Golarion.

Their currency is - denominated in slaves??? Perhaps they just thought that was the only unit of exchange that'd obviously transfer across societies. Carissa hopes she can accept payment in some more convenient format but it's promising for whether she'll be allowed to pursue lichdom. 

(Any visible Carissa reaction is certainly not going to be picked up by the average dath ilani’s Sense Motive, and the top world experts in exactly that have very limited-bandwidth data, given the damage to the plane’s regular comms systems. They have a camera on board which is recording, and the main comms staffperson is going in the Rope Trick and taking the data chip for later transmission, but Khemeth - and various high-ranked Keepers - are not going to get direct high quality video footage of Carissa’s interactions until Merrin arrives.)

The comms volunteer nods to her and then focuses on listening to his earbud.

People are relocating to the cockpit space, carrying ripped-off seat cushions and any soft clothing items (all other carry-on baggage is obviously left behind.) Instructions for order of entry are being announced over the intercom, with who gets relatively safer positions decided by the ranked list that already exists. Airline staff are improvising safety harnesses and optimizing the location of padding based on verbal instructions from Exception Handling over the radio.

There is a general atmosphere of controlled fear mingled with painful hope, but people are pretty calm, and apparently incredibly cooperative at following instructions.

Carissa has been in the army for six years - the Chelish army, which everyone agrees is one of the best-disciplined in the world -- and she's very impressed. You could get Chelish civilians to cooperate with a plan that involves some of their heads being chopped off and frozen but only by making it explicit over the loudspeakers that they'll make sure anyone who doesn't cooperate dies much worse, and they wouldn't be this good at only taking what they're authorized to take, and the children would be waaaay more sniffly and useless.

- they didn't get back to her about whether there'd been people instructed to pray to Asmodeus, but it seems like the thing to do at this stage. She closes her eyes.