Carissa could've overridden her handlers but it's also a tricky problem, right, because the longer you let them fall before the Feather Fall the harder it hits them and maybe that's worth the spell expiring a second or two earlier and dropping them to the ground in a lurch. 

(The not-quite-air-elemental tries to cushion the landing but she's really not sure how much that helped.)

The cockpit plows into a slightly-uphill slope of loose-ish rocks, the product of some years-ago landslide. It's hard for Carissa, using eyeballs alone, to estimate the speed of impact, but it's definitely less than it could have been. 

(It's definitely still intact, though.) 

A few seconds pass. 

(It's still very dark in the pocket dimension, the lighting in the cockpit visible through the weird not-window in its floor went dark when the explosion triggered, and Irris kind of has no idea what's happening. She...is going to count seconds in her head until it's been a full minute, and then try poking her head out.) 

...The copilot may or may not have blacked out for a second or two, there, mostly from the pain of broken bones from the first impact being jarred by the second impact. 

He's still the first one with radio access to reach for it. 

"- Opening doors. Not sure of - orientation - if able and safe to - access Rope Trick, tell - them we've landed." 

(The doors are pointed vaguely upward at a 45 degree angle.) 

Which isn't much of a problem if one can fly. She briefly went higher up to avoid any rocks or metal flung in the air from the landing; she descends. 

Probably they'll mostly be fine, right? It was a loud and scary crash and commoners are very fragile, but they aren't made of glass, they do mostly manage to survive to bear children.

Exception Handling didn't really expect this to work! Their magic user hadn't seemed confident that it would, and made it sound like it would require certain facts about dath ilan's physical laws to be similar to her alternatephysics home world, which seemed even less plausible than the observed fact that their magic user's alternatephysics economicmagic worked in dath ilan period. 

They had thought it was maybe 25% likely to work. If, as they basically expected, it hadn't worked, the capsule would have plowed into loose rocks at something like 15-20 m/s, nearly as hard as the first impact, though in practice the metal would have at least somewhat crumpled to absorb some of those forces.

If it, as expected, didn't work, it would have modestly increased the risk of moderate, non-life-threatening but still disabling injuries a lot in the safest two groups, call it by 3 percentage points for each. For the third group, nearly everyone who was going to take a disabling injury already did in the Feather Fall deceleration; it might have reduced the total disabling-injury risk by 1 percentage point. The effect on life-threatening injuries would have been larger, because anyone already disablingly injured would have been much less able to brace or otherwise protect themselves in a second impact. Call it 5 percentage points drop for the safer two groups, and 6 for the most at-risk group. 

But, thanks to Carissa's efforts at slowing both falling speed and particularly forward/lateral velocity, the second impact was actually quite a lot gentler. The markets expect this to have really helped, especially with the worst-hit group, at cutting the number of really life-threatening injuries. The risk is, of course, still higher than if their main plan had worked as hoped, but the markets are calling:

Safest group

Disabling injuries 41.50%

Life-threatening injuries 27%

Middle group

Disabling injuries 61.50%

Life-threatening injuries 30%

Least safe group

Disabling injuries 92.50%

Life-threatening injuries 35%

These are, of course, actuarial predictions. On average, they're expecting 6 critical injuries and another 3 disabling injuries among the 22 safest people; 11 critical injuries and an additional 12 disabling injuries in the 37 middle-range cohort; 10 critical injuries and another 17 disabling injuries among the 29 most at-risk – adding up to a total of 59 people incapacitated, 27 of them dying, and only 29 people who hopefully have non-incapacitating injuries but will certainly be in pain. 

But each person in each group is rolling those metaphorical dice, and what Carissa actually finds is going to depend on an element of chance and luck. 

...They are somewhat less lucky than that median prediction. The middle group in particular got very unlucky with the angle of impact, and a full 17 of them are critically injured, internal injuries or massive bleeding or punctured lungs or other organ damage that will probably not be survivable over the next 20 minutes without at least heroic first aid. The most at-risk group actually got lucky, with only 8 potentially fatal injuries; the safest group has 7, bringing the number of imminently-dying people to 32. 

The cohort classified as mid-risk was actually a more heterogenous group than the modeling assumptions took into account; it turns out that a number of them were much more at risk of really serious injury than expected, and the rest were...mostly not at higher risk than the safest group, and also got lucky. There are only an additional 4 incapacitating injuries, matching the 4 disabling injuries in the (significantly smaller) "safest" group. The most at-risk group landed about where expected; there are 18 additional incapacitating injuries, leaving only a very lucky 3 of that group with still-extremely-painful broken bones and lacerations that don't entirely prevent them from, like, walking – along with 11 people in the safest group and 16 in the middle group.

In addition to the Rope Trick group, Carissa will have 30 people – plus whoever she heals – to help her save the 31 people still dying once she's used up her single Infernal Healing spell. 

Even dath ilanis are not really up for coordinating to figure out who is currently dying and triaging who should definitely be saved, in ten seconds, when the people in the very best shape just had the breath knocked out of them for the second time in thirty seconds and also nearly all have at least one broken bone. And it's kind of hard for Carissa to even see what's going on, with everyone piled on top of each other in a nest of cushions and tangle of improvised rope harnesses. 

Despite the fact that everyone is trying really very hard not to scream right now if they have any control of it, multiple people are screaming in pain. One man is definitely bleeding out, like, right in front of her, all over two other people; he's gasping, halfway to losing consciousness, and someone is trying to reach him with a rope tourniquet but there's not a lot of room to maneuver.

Possibly those two people against the walls are dead already; they don't seem to be breathing and necks are not meant to bend at that angle. 

One of the people in the "safest" area was an eleven-year-old girl. She's not actually bleeding very much; most of the blood on her is from the person next to her. She also isn't screaming. Probably because skulls are super not meant to be that shape. The person next to her, maybe her father, is screaming – not in pain, though the impact broke both of his legs and the landing definitely sent bone splinters through the skin. He's yelling "HELP", over and over, because a crushed brain, one you can't get cryoprotectants into because it no longer has any intact circulatory system, definitely at least risks a worse cryo outcome, and he thinks she might somehow still have a pulse but he isn't sure. 

Wow, that's a lot of incredibly serious injuries! Things are that ugly after a serious fight sometimes but at least everyone there is going to Hell.

Carissa was hoping that people who can do local nonmagical healing would be indicated in some fashion so she could heal them first! In the absence of that she has no idea how to pick, these people are not screaming offers of valuable things at her! She also doesn't know enough about their brain-freezing to know which if any of these people are at risk of their brains not being freezable!

....though it does seem like probably if their brain is quite smashed then the brain freezing might work less well? "Is the brain freezing her going to be a problem?" she asks the useless yelling guy next to the dying girl, because he clearly has the lung capacity to instead make himself useful.

(Nobody here is really very medically qualified! The staff have basic first aid training, and are also mostly in actual seats and did not have quite so bad a time. Irris is probably the most qualified in field medicine, and she's in the Rope Trick and should probably be fetched if she doesn't emerge on her own.) 

The girl's father is pretty deeply in shock, in addition to panicked, and does not really register that the doors are now open or that Carissa is there. The older man next to him notices, though, and waves to her. 

"We - could try it - will try it - s'not doomed -" he manages. "It's - riskier - but shouldn't waste the spell if she's, if she's, already, biologically dead - there might, be, others..."

And then he grits his teeth and drags in a deep breath. "REPORT ANY CATASTROPHIC HEAD TRAUMA STILL HAS PULSE–" 

There's a pause. 

Nobody reports it. There are certainly head injuries, lots of people are unconscious, at least three people have broken necks and two of them no longer have palpable pulses, but nothing that's nearly as obvious a risk for a bad cryopreservation outcome. 

(They will of course freeze her anyway, and would freeze a brain that had been warm and dead for 24 hours, or one that was in multiple pieces on the ground, or the literal slush of a brain put through a blender – but it's at least much harder, even with molecular-level forensics, to fully reconstruct the initial cognitive starting state of a brain if, instead of dead degrading cells in approximately the places they belong, significant tracts of brain are already molecular soup full of protein-digesting enzymes. It's probably not a True Death, not really, not forever, not like trying to resurrect a pile of cremated ash would be. It's still worse.) 

(The concept that molecular forensics will be possible and used to someday reconstruct the brains of their frozen temporary-dead is too medically relevant an assumption to leave out. Dath ilanis who aren't aware of the Basement might say something like "if necessary the Future will have each star system resurrect one brain per decade as a public hobby project with prediction markets about every neuron, until they're all done.") 

The older man gently pushes the father's arm aside, and reaches in to check for a pulse. 

"- I think she's still - alive - barely, how long–" 

Sure, fine, Infernal Healing on the girl.

Magical healing doesn't care if your skull is the wrong shape and your brain squished inside; it's not paying attention to information theory. She doesn't use it on commoners much, because the Worldwound doesn't have an abundance of commoners. (There are periodic proposals to import some, but they'd eat food, and that makes them expensive). She could tell you that in principle it ought to over the course of one minute heal a commoner anywhere better than 'on the brink of death' to perfect health, and at least get a commoner who is on the brink of death to stop dying on you. 

She doesn't stick around for a minute to watch the girl wake up, because a bunch of the rest of these people are dying too. 

If they had a Good cleric everyone would be right as rain a couple seconds from now but Carissa does not, quite, dare propose they try praying to the Good gods. Instead she'll try battlefield first aid. The Chelish form of battlefield first aid for wizards is heating up the tip of your dagger with Prestidigitation and cauterizing bleeding bits of people.

She's not actually entirely sure this is a helpful thing to do if you have no magic healing for them later either, but even if it just means they die more slowly it'll mean they can do the heads one at a time instead of all at once.

Are the people with the not-Final-Blade out of the Rope Trick yet?

(Asmodeus, please, take them, if you can see them, make them eternal and perfect...)

The comms volunteer - who was in the safer position, and has enough broken ribs that breathing is pretty hard right now, but is still conscious - kind of wishes their magic user had, like, asked someone about that before shoving superheated metal into people's wounds. But it does in fact seem like the thing worth doing right now. Reconstructive medicine in a specialist hospital setting is very good, and Carissa's method is faster than improvised bandages and tourniquets. There are like a dozen people with massive, arterial-looking external bleeding, which in most cases their neighbors are desperately trying to control by holding pressure with literally just their hands; no one except the one guy has lost an immediately-fatal quantity of blood. 

(The one guy is still technically breathing, albeit in the agonal gasps of someone very near death. With supplementary oxygen and immediate massive blood transfusion, he might have, like, a 50% chance of making it. He's not going to survive this, though.) 

A lot of people have internal injuries and bleeding. Carissa's dagger strategy is not going to work there unless she wants to do emergency dagger surgery. None of them look like they're going to die in the next three minutes without intervention, though. 

Anyone capable of walking and using their hands is now freeing themselves and their neighbors from the harnesses, and starting to move and extract anyone who seems at all safe to move from the slightly squashed cockpit area. The ground is rocky and uneven, but there are lots of cushions available to lay people on. And this frees up floorspace for the casualties who definitely can't be moved. All three people with suspected-broken-necks have now been located and laid out on the (sloped) floor, with the relatively uninjured passengers trading off on manual chest compressions (nearly everyone has that much first aid training!), because their injuries are almost certainly not survivable but they can at least artificially maintain nonzero circulation until Irris arrives with her cryo decapitation kit.  

The comms staffperson emerges from the Rope Trick first; the rope is hanging at an angle, but the people inside the Rope Trick were unaffected by the impact. 

Irris passes her box down, and then slithers down the rope. 

(Kid and mom are staying in the Rope Trick. They're fine, at least physically, but nobody thinks a four-year-old needs to see the sight that Irris is expecting will greet her.) 

She looks around. 

....Yeah, no, this is worse than anything they've given Merrin before.

Merrin is not going to be happy when she lands. But it's, you know, better than almost-futilely trying to match up and chill bits and pieces of a planeful of brains that were exploded into fragments twenty minutes ago. 

That guy, judging by his color, looks like he was dead on impact, and the attempt at CPR is not doing much, possibly because in addition to a broken neck, it looks like he has some really serious crush injuries to his torso; he's leaking blood from his nose and mouth with every chest compression. But his head looks intact. 

(The padding prioritized that. Eleven-year-old girl just got a bad roll of the dice – but she's going to be okay. She was close enough to the brink of death that Infernal Healing isn't going to get her up to full health, but it will at least get her stable.) 

Irris will pick her way over to that person, then, trying not to slip on the floor which is covered in blood and also has lots of sharp jagged metal bits. 

She kneels in a spreading pool of slippery still-warm blood. Sets down her box and, stony-faced, presses her palm to the biometric sensor - usually only the staff are keyed to it, but they added her - and opens it (the latch is magnetic and it's probably not at all obvious to Carissa how it works). She takes out the folded-up guillotine and tugs on the tab to spring-unfold it into its functional shape.

Her face is completely expressionless as she gently nudges a somewhat shocky and dazed CPR-doer out of the way, and carefully lifts the man's head - good, his skull feels skull-shaped at least, though necks sure are not supposed to move like that and she's never touched a real dead body before and she can have feelings about this later - and places it in the correct position. 

She toggles on her own microphone; it's kind of loud enough in here, she would rather not shout to their magic user. "Cooling spell over here," she says tonelessly. 

"Got it," Carissa tells the not-Final-Blade lady from where she's busy reheating her dagger and then cauterizing peoples' injuries with it. She looks - well, uninjured, obviously, the only person here that's true of, but also surprisingly okay emotionally; if she were a dath ilani she wouldn't be artificially sounding calmer than she feels, and her tone was distinctly casual. She is somewhat covered in blood, but her uniform is designed to take a lot of blood before it looks different.

She flies over to the head and starts cooling it. 

Well, she seems to be...maybe not exactly someone with her world's equivalent of Merrin's job, but - something in that direction? She is clearly experienced not just with magic but with emergencies. Merrin wouldn't look that fine, but Merrin is very unusually emotionally demonstrative for a dath ilani. 

The comms staffperson has the actual first aid kit that was in the cockpit. It has a lot of drugs in it - including antibiotics, and some intramuscular injections of a drug blend intended to treat shock and increase blood pressure - and some lightweight sterile bandages, and exactly one setup to run IV fluids by gravity. 

He’s handling the situation with reasonable dignity. But he’s really quite young, and he's never been in a life-or-death emergency period, let alone one that could have involved the True Death of everyone on the plane. 

“Triage on who needs IV fluids," he says tightly to the first-rank Keeper now descending from the Rope Trick. 

She can do that. The people still in the cockpit area at all are a pretty good approximation of who's worst-injured, since they're the ones who were too unstable to move. 

(To Carissa, she gives off a noticeably different vibe from the others present. She's calm, and radiates dignity in a way that isn't really much like a high-circle cleric of Asmodeus, but perhaps has something in common with it.) 

She moves between the injured people helping the worse-injured around them. Dense bursts of words are exchanged. This language is very good at the things it's optimized for, and "rapid communication in high-stakes time-pressured situations" is certainly one of those things, if not the only one. Baseline makes it very quick for people to put numbers on everything, too. 

She settles on a man in his late 20s. His arm is broken and twisted badly enough that it might not be salvageable given the inevitable delays in surgical treatment, and he had some pretty significant blood loss from a torn brachial artery before Carissa cauterized the wound. His ribs on that side are broken badly enough, in enough places, that the whole section is moving in the opposite direction of what it should, sucking in rather than out when he tries to breathe; he's not screaming in pain mostly because getting any air is enough of a struggle. His lung is probably punctured; he's coughing up bloody foam. He's clearly in deep shock: drenched in sweat, his color translucent ashy pale with a blue tinge around his lips. But despite the blood loss, he's conscious and still oriented enough to respond to yes-or-no questions. The bleeding is under control, he doesn't show any signs of serious abdominal internal injuries, and he's young and fit and healthy enough that he can probably - the person making the guess thought 40%, but the Keeper thinks it's higher - last twenty minutes until Merrin reaches them, if they can keep his blood pressure up. 

Second broken-neck person might have still had a heartbeat at the moment of second impact, but she doesn't now. She's getting CPR, though, and probably can afford to wait twenty seconds longer while Irris gets the guy who is no longer bleeding out on the floor because his body is approximately out of blood to lose. His heart is still trying to beat – he's also young and previously healthy, it probably will for a while – but there's no longer any measurable blood pressure, and his expression is now slack in deep unconsciousness, all color blanched from his face, his eyes creepily still open.

The elderly woman with a broken collarbone who was with him in his last conscious moments is quietcrying, but moves away without prompting so that Irris can remove his head. 

Irris isn't crying. Irris' hands are steady. Her lips are pressed together in a firm line. Her clothes are now pretty much soaked in other people's blood. She picks up the severed head by the hair - it's not bleeding much from the neck, unlike the first one - and proffers it to Carissa. They should probably, like, line them up against the wall or something. Maybe wrapped in people's clothes because it'll provide some insulation once they're cooled to 15 C.

(And because – well, actually probably most of the terrified injured people here are fine with it, and the sight of a pile of severed heads will if anything be reassuring (the blood everywhere is not great but it's also a lost cause), but Irris is going to find it distracting.) 

Carissa figured they were going to put the heads into those crates that were briefly shown to her earlier so they can keep each other cold but she's not sure where the crates are. ...possibly no one else is going to get on that, the able-bodied ones look busy. Without letting go of this severed head she will take off into the air and look for crates or other things suitable for head storage.

The crates weren't actually part of the supplies that came in the cockpit. They're bulky, and there wouldn't have been a good way to secure them, and there really wasn't much space. 

The wreckage of the remainder of the plane is, however, strewn across like a mile of rocks. The main fuselage was sort of intact after the explosion, but broke off from the remaining wing, and none of it is intact after the impact. Part of it is on fire. The crates were lighter weight, and slowed more by air resistance when the plane exploded and fell apart around them; it's plausible a couple are intact, and they're brightly-colored enough to pick out against the scree. 

...Various people are watching Carissa thoughtfully. 

Just about everyone on-site who is conscious and tracking events enough to have thoughts is thinking, in unison, "well that just about wraps it up for the hypothesis that our universe runs on simple physics." A few of the passengers, who have relatively high secrecy clearances, are speculating further, trying figure out where in the Greater Multiverse this sort of thing happens. Some of them are comparing it to a range of existing fictional tropes. 

The Keeper is mostly nonplussed that this is APPARENTLY the most probable continuation from her True Death. She's poring over what she remembers of the emergency in the seconds before the magic user suddenly appeared – she didn't see it herself, she was sitting up front, a long way away from Irris, and someone obviously did alert her quickly but not immediately, or until after a whole lot of tsi-imbis that she did not actually hear because it's very hard to hear anything in a crashing plane, and the lights were all out. She's now trying to look back to see if she can remember a moment before she actually saw the magic user, when her thread of consciousness would've been plausibly interrupted by sufficiently sudden death, or if she should just regard this as confirmation for Average Fate over Experiential Thread. 

Also Carissa's appearance was not captured on video, before, they did not have that much comms to the plane.  In the face of True Death and zero better plans, they went with Carissa's apparent existence, and everybody reporting on her apparent existence, because Why Not.  People took it all at face value because there was some kind of anomaly going on, though its true nature was not yet determined, let alone that it necessarily violated known physics; and there was nothing more clever to do with that anomaly than take it at apparent face value and ask how to minimize True Deaths inside of whatever scenario the apparent anomaly was presenting.

But let's get something straight here: anything short of a hundred True Deaths, and the sort of people who live in dath ilan will not prioritize almost anything else over...

Well, how to put this?  A very young, very inexperienced programmer, whose code does something unexpected, may ask if their code is doing something harmful; and if not, they might not worry too much, because the weirdness isn't harmful weirdness, whatever it is.

A wiser programmer realizes that if your code does something unexpected, it means your model of the code is wrong, and the truth could be just about anything, and that code could do just about anything, including harmful things, because it is allowed to violate your model in nearly arbitrary other ways, given that your current model of the code has been falsified by whatever surprised you.  Only known and decrypted bugs, whose behavior is understood on a gears level and no longer surprising, can ever be rated harmless; because only known and decrypted bugs can ever have a severity level assigned to them that isn't just a guess.

Most of the money, previously, was not on the satellite imagery showing any physical anomalies over the ejected nose cone.  Whatever weird prank was going on, it was mostly expected to not be that real, and to be very sad and disappointing and to end with some criminal prosecutions.

But now, the airplane's nose has (a) hit the ground too late according to conventional physics and (b) pushing the satellite imagery to the limit, it's clear that there are survivors moving away from the wreckage.  They do not quite have the resolution, let alone 3D resolution, to see Carissa flying around; but it's clear that there are survivors.

It's not absolute confirmation, but it sure looks like Existence is exhibiting surprising and unexpected behavior.  It's not that the unexpected, unexplained, surprising behavior has been harmful so far, it may have just saved around a hundred True Lives; buuuuut the point is that nobody understands what code Existence is running on, any more, and it could do literally anything in the next minute.

The entirety of Civilization's mild-infohazard-cleared attention is now focused on this subject only.  Seven thousand people get emergency pages or helicopters dispatched for them, Civilization preempts all preemptable labor towards a massive review of all known cameras and recordings in case more people have materialized anywhere, a nuclear missile has been armed (and pointed at this location), the highest-ranked Keeper now has the emergency code to melt all of Civilization's computers, &c &c &c.

They don't wait for evidence to hit them over the head and force them to pay attention, in these parts.  They try to get ahead of the curve.

For all the effort that went into optimizing a plan based on taking the apparent anomaly at face value, the call wasn't made, before they had Actual Confirmation, to update Merrin on what she should expect to find at the crash site. They mostly did not expect her to find survivors, and it wouldn't have called for a huge update on her basic plan for her to, instead of digging through scattered wreckage of a whole plane for partially intact brains, instead digging through a much smaller region of debris full of tightly-packed squashed bodies. 

It was not considered a very good idea to take Merrin, who was trying to get herself into emergency-ready mental shape after having been urgently yoinked from the middle of doing Masochist Things, and throw an incredibly weird and confusing anomaly at her, when the anomaly might not actually involve her having to change her plans. 

...The situation is now, obviously, different, and Exception Handling was already trying to be ahead of that part of the curve; they have a briefing prepped for her, and transmit it.