Asmodeus, greatest of the gods, hear Your servant, that she may deliver to you the souls of these people, who go nowhere when they die; grant me the strength to conquer them, if You'd have me rule them, or to call Your greater servants here, if your work here cannot be done by me, but see in their obedience and their efficiency as much good as can ever be found in mortals, and if it is your will then take them to You in Hell, or permit me to save them. 

There is, in fact, a raging debate and a number of Very Serious People quietyelling on conference calls on the question of whether to try to clarify what the nuclear sewage plant she means!!! There...is a lot of inferential distance. The people who would need to have the conversation are extremely busy doing other things. Exception Handling has...fiction tropes??? and not much else to go on when picking questions to ask. 

Also, some of the Basement-cleared experts involved, and currently having their own private groupchat, think that it sort of sounds like the thing she wants them to do is, perhaps, analogous to trying to attract the attention of a superintelligence. And doing that when it's the wrong call is, uh, maybe actually worse than 96 True Deaths. (And, at least ignoring "the alien magic user can actually do what she claims she can do" and "nothing goes unexpectedly and catastrophically wrong before the go-ahead point", which do add massive uncertainty to the markets, the predictions on outcomes are actually a lot more optimistic than that.) 

One involved party in particular (in fact, the person responsible for advancing the concept of an "unrescue simulation" and horrifying even high-ranked Keepers) has concerns. Not, like, particularly specific concerns, yet. Basically all they have to go on is the mention of alternatephysics where ontologically-basic-minds experience awakening on their body's destruction, some very vague observations that are perhaps concerning, and also the fact that - if this is real - it's impossible according to known models of physics, meaning that the truth of the matter is suddenly pretty unconstrained, and the anomaly might continue to be helpful but she might, also, be incredibly dangerous to Civilization. 

It's an unimaginably awful tradeoff, to turn down a chance of saving people's minds and selves because it might maybe place the long-term future of Civilization at risk. But it's a tradeoff that Exception Handling can and will make. 

And there are less than three minutes to go, which really is barely any time for terrified airline passengers to learn and execute a novel mental procedure? that might be complicated and will certainly be very alien? 

They don't ask Carissa about it. 

(If Khemeth were watching video footage of Carissa in that moment, he too would have some concerns. But mostly curiosities. Khemeth right now is instead intensely frustrated because psychologically modeling an accidental visitor from an alien economicmagic fantasy setting is a fascinating challenge and the data he has to go on right now is so incredibly sparse.) 

The prediction markets think there is about a 70% chance that this plan works, where "works" is defined as "the economicmagic works approximately as advertised, and nothing terrible goes wrong with the explosives or other elements." 

Most of the uncertainty is in the fact that their alien magic user, however apparently-motivated and prosocial, is an unknown quantity. She says that she can cast "in combat" which is, you know, concerning in its implications and also not necessarily analogous to this, and ALSO they do still only have her word for it, and - especially judging by some of her reactions in discussion - she may not have the cognitive training in how to demarcate and correct for or at least flag internal biases and metacognitive blind spots. They don't even know for sure that all of her magic works in dath ilan; maybe the cooling works but the more powerful spells don't. They cannot exactly test this because of the limited-number-of-spells magic system constraint. 

There's also some probability mass (another 10%, bringing the odds of uncomplicated success to only 60%) on a further deterioration in the plane's remaining limited control systems and steering, resulting in them plummeting to the ground before they are strictly speaking ready.

It doesn't look like this is going to happen. Planes are really heavily overengineered, and it took a cosmically low-probability event to cause this crash at all. They should have enough warning to abandon the caution and careful padding and securing going on in the cockpit compartment and instead just have everyone sprint for it as fast as possible, and Irris-and-kid plus the kid's mom (sponsored by a very wealthy venture capitalist who thinks it's completely unacceptable for a child to be separated from their parent, even though this required bumping a passenger with basic field-medic training) are waiting along with the other prioritized passengers. If they hit this eventuality, they can probably still get the spells off, but the unsecured passengers will have a vastly higher chance of very serious injury. And they only have one "Doomiest" healing spell. They might be able to keep a third of them alive until help arrives. 

If they make it to the go-ahead point, they will actually have 88 people (including staff) crammed into the cockpit, plus the eight in the pocket dimension.

The chance of minor injuries is almost 100% for everyone, but the people in what are considered the very safest positions (22 of them) have only a 30% chance of injuries severe enough to be disabling, and a 10% chance of injuries-potentially-fatal-without-immediate-treatment – in expectation, that's 2-3 casualties in need of immediate treatment to survive until Merrin's arrival. 

The slightly less-safe next 37 people have a 60% chance of disabling injuries and a 15% chance of near-term potentially fatal injuries – probably 5-6 such cases. The least safe positions (29 remaining passengers) have a 75% chance of disabling injuries, but still only up to a 25% chance of life-threatening injuries – 7 or 8. In an average case, call in 17 potentially fatal injuries. But, of course, they could get unlucky, and have more than that. (Or lucky!!! That might also happen!!!) 

They will probably, hopefully, have enough able-bodied people - or at least people with only minor injuries, distracting but not disabling - to provide said basic treatment. They'll have direct coaching from Exception Handling, or even Merrin herself if she's listening in at that point. But they don't have any fully trained medtechs on the scene, and they'll have approximately no medical supplies or equipment; the cryo kit is already taking up space they don't, really, have to spare. They're going to lose some of those people. The 20% / 50% / 80% spread on what percentage they'll be able to stabilize in time, assuming between 15 and 25 total casualties, is 85% / 55% / 40%. (It's a really wide spread, because it's just...hard to know...how untrained bystanders are going to respond in an emergency like this, while themselves injured and in pain.) 

...There's also a division point based on whether they manage to time the Feather Fall exactly enough that the cockpit section crashes while still slowed. They don't know if they will, and aren't going to get that uncertainty any lower until it actually happens, but they think there's a 35% chance they'll manage it. If they do, odds of serious injury in particular - mostly hitting people who are already too badly injured from the first sudden deceleration to protect themselves - will go down significantly. If they don't manage it, odds will worsen, though by less. 

There's only a 5% risk of a more-than-10-meter drop at 1g acceleration, but it would be really bad; in particular, they would expect significantly disabling injuries to hit nearly everyone, massively cutting the number of people able to administer first aid to, well, probably at least double if not triple the number of imminently dying people. That's the scenario where they expect less than half of the passengers to survive even until Merrin's arrival. 

The comms relay volunteer has been very busy instead relaying instruction and trying to help coordinate the flow of cooperative but very anxious passengers, but - they're nearly there. 

90 seconds to go until the Rope Trick and emergency maneuvers. 

He warns Carissa of this, and - okay, she probably doesn't want the raw market prediction data. Maybe he'll just tell her that "if we reach the trigger point and your spells work normally in this world, the strategy planning markets think we might only have to cryopreserve ten people or less." 

"Should I cast Fly now so you know third circle spells work, or one of the ones you're not using like Resist Energy?"

The people actually on the plane are basically not really considering the world where Carissa is really from another world, and is also lying to them! Why would that be a possibility worth considering! Their epistemic state is mostly "either none of this is real and it's a hallucination, or a woman with magical powers really appeared from nowhere on a crashing plane, and is responding more or less in the completely obvious way that any normal person would". 

Certain people with Exception Handling are taking into account that the alien magic user is likely also a psychological alien, from a culturally alien society. There are almost certainly vast swathes of inferential distance, most of which they probably haven't noticed yet because the communication time here has been so incredibly limited. Experts are, of course, poring over every second of recorded audio radio-transmitted back to them, there is data to be extracted even from that given more time. 

...They still put less than 5% odds - and probably less than 1%, though even the most liquid prediction markets don't converge that fast on such a confusing and out-of-model problem - that the magic user is straight-up lying about whether she can fly or slow the fall of the cockpit section. It's difficult to see how she could possibly have any incentive toward that, when she's the one who made the initial offer, who volunteered the descriptions of her magic in the first place, who didn't even ask first how much she would get paid for this. 

(Hard to know what that means, coming from her. There are a lot of dath ilanis who would, in a time-pressured emergency with nearly a hundred True Deaths on the line, put off any and all negotiations around compensation until afterward. They would of course assume that they were getting paid, and that their performance incentive wouldn't be any lower than in the counterfactual, because the last thing dath ilan wants to do is punish someone for making that prioritization call. The magic user may or may not have literally any of that context; her behavior may have an entirely different source. Hard to know. They don't have anyone on-site with unusually good social perception and modeling capabilities, and there are massive efficiency losses to doing that via verbal and text reports only.) 

Anyway. While "trust, but verify" is a policy within Exception Handling - and perhaps part of the infrastructure that allows most of dath ilan to simply "trust" - they recognize that the verification step can be expensive, especially in a time-pressured emergency, and that this is a situation where you need to figure out what points are actually actionable and satisfice really hard. 

The comms volunteer hesitates for about two seconds while instructions are relayed. 

"Hold off on Fly, might need full duration. Can you subjectively tell if Resist Energy cast on yourself worked or does it require us to test somehow - could slightly increase safety for yourself with resistance against fire, for scenario where something goes wrong with explosives–" 

"I can tell if my spells cast normally. Tongues is working fine. Absent specific reason not to do that I'm also gonna cast a Summon once your airship is sinking slowly, try to get an extraplanar-entities-of-ontologically-basic-air-substance and get it to stabilize and slow it down, but that might well not work if your nearby planes are different."

80 seconds to go. Nearly everyone in the plane is up front now, either in the cockpit or within a literally five-second sprint of it while they wait for the people before them to be packed in and secured. The remaining time is allocated for improving the makeshift crash harnesses and padding. 

(There are already minor injuries, because hurriedly moving around a plane during intense turbulence is not, like, a great idea. The worst injury is a broken wrist, though.) 

The comms staffperson is now alerting the comms volunteer that it looks like the next ten seconds will be low-risk-of-turbulence can start proceeding up toward the front of the plane. 

"Follow me," he says, unsecuring himself from the seat harness and standing. "Confirm yes-no, Tongues is generally-comparable power level to Feather Fall or Rope Trick?" He waits, like, half a second for her response. "Ten-second explanation of the entities you propose summoning, and their properties and traits?" 

Exception Handling also has a lot of questions about the "nearby planes", and what it would mean for them to be different, but that can wait. 

She follows. She is apparently unbothered by the turbulence; you can't break her wrist this way. "Tongues is more powerful and complex than Feather Fall or Rope Trick. Extraplanar-entities-of-ontologically-basic-air-substance are aliens native to a plane we call the Ontologically-basic-air-plane. It'll be under my control, it'll last six rounds, it's not that powerful but it can probably make the airship land more gently."

They reach the very front row of seats. Eight people are lined up for the Rope Trick. There's a length of rope for her, the strongest lightweight rope on the plane, cut to exactly 30 feet. There's a spot marked out for where they actually want her to cast it, just inside the doors that will seal off the cockpit and prevent anyone from literally falling out. The explosive detonation and controlled midair fragmentation are going to very suddenly change the aerodynamic profile of what was previously a plane and is now plane-pieces, and will among other things push the nosecone of the cockpit area up and facing the sky. 

Their plan is actually counting quite a lot on that, because the stall speed of a catastrophically damaged passenger jet plane is still very, very fast in terms of forward/lateral velocity, and the explosive separation will probably impart more forward velocity.

If Feather Fall only affects vertical velocity, "falling", which is what they understand to probably be the case - though not with complete certainty, since their magic user's past experience of it doesn't involve this particular scenario and it sounds like their world doesn't have powered flying machines that can move faster than a Fly spell - then the initial deceleration will only affect vertical velocity. 

 They will brake and slow to the point at which the plane would in very few seconds start to plummet like a stone, sacrificing forward velocity and momentum to at least somewhat decrease the downward velocity. The first three seconds of air resistance on the cockpit capsule will continue that energy-trade, (very inefficiently) converting forward velocity into upward acceleration, and then Carissa casts Feather Fall.

If they get very, very lucky, the falling speed at that instant might only be double the Feather Fall maximum speed, and they'll have thirty seconds of air resistance to slow the remaining lateral speed, so that the remainder of the plane is not moving forward very fast when it either gently drops, or accelerates and plows, into the uneven rocky ground. 

Exception Handling would really like to know if the extraplanar-entities-of-ontologically-basic-air-substance aliens are people. Also, you know, if any catastrophic events have been known to happen with "summonings" and failure to "control" the aliens, HOWEVER THAT EVEN WORKS it's KIND OF UNSETTLING. 

70 seconds. 

"Two questions, ten second answers to each: Are these aliens known to be intelligent enough to be self-aware in the way that humans are - or, alternately, at least enough to have experiences including suffering," the comms volunteer asks. These are hopefully a concept that the magic user's world has. (If it doesn't then that's also concerning!!) "Are there known incidents of magic user error or other causes leading to catastrophic failure modes from summonings in general?" 

It's not a confusing question. "Yes and no."

The pause is longer this time, more like five seconds. 

"- You are cleared to attempt it," the man says. "Extradimensional pocket in sixty seconds. Standby until then unless we tell you to go now in which case - cast Fly first if that lets you control your own momentum, the explosive detonation will be less controlled if we need to advance it." 

The markets, not that Carissa can see them, now think there's an 85% chance that her magic will work approximately as she expects it to. 

Still a 10% chance of the plane starting to break up in the next 60 seconds, though. They're trying a very difficult maneuver with a badly damaged system. 

"Is there a reason not to cast the Rope Trick in advance of whatever you're attempting? It'll last for hours, its duration isn't part of the problem here."

Well, if she casts it right now then the people entering it are going to be blocking the route for the people still filing into the cockpit area for securing, but - sure, the rope itself won't be too much in the way. She can cast it now. 

Rope Trick. She watches which eight merited placement in it because it seems important as insight into this society and who its elites are.

Carissa is probably not going to be able to figure out much about the social status of the people climbing the rope (lined up and ready, but with actual climbs carefully timed and instructed by the comms person to minimize how much they're in the way of the parallel stream of people still entering the cockpit.) Dath ilan's entire attitude toward elites is pretty skew relative to Golarion's, and dath ilani standard clothing is...well, first of all, weird and alien, and secondly, by Golarion standards all of it is very high quality. 

The people allocated to the Rope Trick include: 

- Irris, the woman who initially greeted her. By Golarion standards, she looks probably in her mid-40s. (Her actual chronological age is 53, but dath ilan has, like, sunscreen.) She is wearing a hand-dyed jumpsuit in vividly colorful patterns; a dath ilani would describe her gendertrope as grandmother, subtype: retired-nomad-woman. She's actually seemed like one of the people on the flight who's handled this the most matter-of-factly, if not the most visibly competently. (Irris has watched a LOT of Exception Handling emergency sims, and participated in some as an Assistant Bystander to her daughter.) 

- Four-year-old child, whose cheeks are a little tearstained right now - it's been a very scary few minutes - but who is, currently, calm and cooperative. 

- A woman in her late 20s (presumably the four-year-old-child's mother given the reassuring cuddles being exchanged), wearing simple, soberly-colored clothing and, for some reason, a veil over her face. 

- The official comms staffperson from the plane, who is visibly wearing a uniform matching the other airline staff and a set of earbuds, and also was working on some sort of glowing-screen-console and subvocalizing instructions until, like, three seconds before his turn to climb the rope. Up close, it's visible that he has...weird smudges...on his face? (If Carissa is actually paying close enough attention to notice this, it almost looks like he's wearing some sort of cosmetics, but specifically to look uglier???) 

- A woman in her 30s wearing an elaborate, multi-layered velvet and very-convincing-fake-fur set of robes and an extremely complicated headpiece that may or may not be made of actual vines and driftwood, which she takes off and tosses under the seats before climbing in. Also she inexplicably has a pattern of ferns painted on her face???? 

- A teenage boy who doesn't really stand out from the crowd in any way (though he, too, has weird face smudges.) 

- An older woman - fifties, maybe sixties - in clothing that doesn't quite match what anyone else is wearing, and seems like it probably signifies something about her, but Carissa has no context for reading into what it signifies. 

- A man, also in his mid-30s but not a particularly fit mid-30s, dressed in a way that - relative to the baseline around him - mostly conveys practicality and perhaps not caring very much about whether one’s clothing is flattering. (He doesn’t have weird face smudges; he is also, like, notably at least somewhat unattractive.) 

…Also, with the better lighting from the cockpit’s emergency power systems, and a chance to see more of the passengers up-close, Carissa will notice that, like, a LOT of people above age 13-15 and below age 35-40 are either wearing veils or have weird face smudges.

ALSO also, this one guy sure is wearing what looks like an actual crown! An unfamiliar style, more hat-shaped than circlet-like, but it sure does look like real gold! And it’s studded with a dozen huge, glittering, unflawed gems in many colors, and the centerpiece surely can’t be an ACTUAL diamond but, if it were, it looks big enough to cast, like, 30 Wishes.

- he doesn’t get a spot in the Rope Trick, apparently. And - just as everyone else is emptying their pockets of unsecured potentially sharp objects - he pulls off his ??crown??, and throws it under the seats, before calmly following the muttered instructions and walking into the cockpit, arms held up so the rushed and harried ??volunteer?? for this task (she’s not wearing a uniform) can secure him to the mound of people-and-cushions with rope and straps cut from the airline seats. 

45 seconds until final braking maneuver. 

One of the airline staff passes a compact box up to Irris in the Rope Trick.