!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!????????????????????????????

How embarrassing exactly it is to tsi-imbi at a sixth-rank Keeper briefing her over videoconference, because he just made a Very Serious Oath that this is definitely not a sim, so this is not a sim, and yet surely this cannot actually be happening 

Sometimes you, in fact, gotta do things even if they are ABSURDLY EMBARRASSING. 

"Tsi-imbi with respect to this briefing claiming alternatephysics definitely happened. Moving on how does this change my approach here. I assume you - knew this sooner - and there's a protocol..." 

Carissa flies over to some crates, puts the head in one without ceasing to cool it, and flies back to pick up the next head. 

It has occurred to her that her arrival on this planet is (once it's widely learned-of) going to be tremendously disruptive, though because she is lacking some context on dath ilan she is mistaken about how. What's obvious is that either they don't have magic, even though it works, and someone who can teach them how to do magic is going to be valuable far far beyond the value of the plane full of important people, or they do have magic and were keeping that secret, in which case they might well just kill everyone to keep the secret. 

If they don't have magic, she has no idea how many different factions on this planet are now angling to either acquire her or keep her from their enemies, but it's probably upwards of ten. And she is not, in fact, currently prepared to take them on; a third-circle wizard could prepare spells so as to be at least extremely inconvenient for non-magic users to kill, but she didn't.

Really it would probably have been much smarter to let the plane crash, fly away, observe them in secret for several years, and then do stuff, except that the whole plane situation might well be a test. It's a pretty decent way to test new people if you're creating them, now that she thinks of that; are they Lawful? Are they competent? Are they obedient?

Even if the thousands of slaves were a real offer she's not sure how to use thousands of slaves to solve this problem. 

By the time she gets back, Irris has removed three more heads – the woman with the broken neck, a woman in her fifties whose catastrophic internal bleeding was fatal even after Carissa cauterized the external bleeding, and an elderly man (sixty-five, and visibly the oldest on the plane) whose skull wasn't crushed but who definitely got a hard knock that probably ruptured an age-weakened blood vessel. He lost consciousness sometime during the seconds of Feather Fall, and by the time Irris reached him for triage, was showing signs of rapidly increasing intracranial pressure: pupils fixed and dilated, blood pressure spiking and heart rate dropping, breathing shallow and irregular. His heart was still beating when she cut off his head; in a hospital, with a full surgical suite, he might even have survived this, though not cognitively intact. They're not in a hospital, though, and twenty minutes would be too late even if Merrin could pull off major neurosurgery with field equipment and almost thirty other critical patients. 

She's now hovering very close to a fifth casualty, a woman in her thirties who had been four months pregnant before the violent impact. (She, too, was one of the "safer" cohort, who got unlucky.) There's no saving the fetus at this point, and the woman is now hemorrhaging badly; she's young, she might hold on until Merrin arrives and can meaningfully treat the blood loss, but she might not, either. 

"Is there anything you can do about internal bleeding," she says tightly. "We don't have the tools for surgical procedures until the EMT gets here." 

"I don't have any more healing. What 'tools' do you need for 'surgical procedures'."

"To do it properly? Diagnostic imaging equipment, and a sterile operating room, and a full set of sterile instruments and supplies, and anesthesia, and–" She stops herself. "We don't have that. We'd be, I guess, cutting people open if we suspect they have massive abdominal bleeding - without anesthesia so probably just the unconscious ones - and pinch off the artery that's bleeding or just stuff some totally non sterile clothing into their abdominal cavity. My daughter could do it and not lose anyone from botching it - though it'd be a horrific infection risk later. I'm not..."

Shrug. "I - can try. Probably worth trying if we're losing them already. Your - whatever that is - isn't really a substitute for a scalpel, but if you heat it and let it cool it'd at least be more sterile..." 

"Hot knives don't cause infections," Carissa confirms, still cooling heads. "And they'll be fine tomorrow, if nothing's happened to me by then, I can patch them up properly then if your nonmagical healing can keep them alive that long."

Well. Who is close enough to dying that Irris doing amateur surgery on them with something that looks sort of like a weird oversized vegetable-paring knife is at least not going to make their odds worse? 

This middle-aged man probably has a lacerated liver or something in addition to broken ribs - maybe caused by a jagged rib splinter - and he's losing blood fast; his abdomen is already distended, bruised blue. He's semi-conscious, gasping, being propped up by a woman who is probably his wife and is doing her best to hold him up in a position where he can breathe despite the fact that she clearly has two broken wrists. Going by his grayish color, he doesn't have very many minutes left. 

"All right. Let's do this." Irris squats at his side. Calls out to two nearby people. "I need someone to hold him - don't think we should wait until he's unconscious - hey magic user," she should ask for a name maybe at some point but is going to forget it in two seconds if she asks for it now, "I need your knife, and - find me a shirt or something–" 

The nearest shirt is her own; she takes it off and passes it over and steps on the man's upper arms in an immobilizing fashion like someone who has done this before.

(She's still cooling heads.)

(Now outside in the daylight, it's a lot more obvious to even very distracted bystanders that Carissa is very attractive and not at all faceblanded. This does not get less distracting when she's shirtless.) 

Irris has the pointless thought that Merrin, who is by dath ilan standards very unusually high on "attraction to both genders", might find that really hot. She pushes it aside, though, and is not otherwise distracted. 

(What training does this woman have? It's a weird mix of skills; some of it is the sort of thing Exception Handling roles would cover, but the combination of it feels odd?) 

Time to slice open this guy's belly and hope she can find whatever's bleeding in there! 

He's still conscious enough to shriek in pain!!! He's not strong enough to resist very effectively, though, especially with Carissa and his wife both working on keeping him immobilized. 

That's so much blood!!!! It's really hard to SEE anything through all the blood!!! She really needs one of those field suction thingies that Merrin hauls around. She does not have that. She has Carissa's shirt, which is already somewhat bloody but not saturated. 

Irris tries to mop at the Blood Everywhere. "I could use a flashlight," she mutters. "I don't know if the first aid kit - magic user, can you do lights, I forgot if that was on the list–" 

She catches the Prestidigitation, reaches down to make her dagger suddenly glow like a torch, and goes back to the Prestidigitation. 

That's really useful! Weird alternatephysics powers are great, actually, even if Irris is pretty sure that literally everyone in Exception Handling - and also Governance, and probably secret projects she isn't cleared to know about - is having a DAY. 

Irris swabs at blood and uses the knife as a light instead of a knife, and - 

"- I think this is our problem? Maybe?" Something membrane-y is torn and it sure is where the blood seems to be coming from. Most of the blood. Now some of it is coming from the abdominal wall muscles she just sawed through. "I - don't know how to stop it without sticking my fingers in there - can you make the blade hot again, we might be able to just cauterize the general area..." Which is presumably really bad for this guy's liver function, but, you know, if he survives the next half-hour he can get a new liver later. 

(Merrin is experienced enough - albeit with sim patients, but sim dummies can be very realistic at gore - to do this without flinching or making squeamish faces. Irris...isn't that experienced. She is, however, still not hesitating at all, and her hands are steady.) 

Sure. Metal actually heats much faster than water; she can have the edge of the blade glowing after only around fifteen seconds. 

Eeeeesh. Irris is going to very carefully use her now-red-hot knife to...sort of poke where the blood seems to be coming from???? This is really stressful. She has to keep reminding herself that this guy was dead in 5-10 minutes anyway and if she manages to kill him faster than that, she has her head removing device literally right there, and it wouldn't be changing the outcome. 

SCREAMING

Irris...looks a lot more distressed about this than about the blood and guts, actually. She flinches visibly, and has to take a deep breath and grit her teeth before she can make herself push the glowing-hot blade in further. 

...But there's at least less blood now? He's definitely bleeding from a lot of places but it's not spurting. 

Irris takes another deep breath, and rolls up Carissa's shirt and stuffs it into the incision. 

(The casualty is no longer screaming, because he seems to have passed out, his eyes rolled back and his breathing coming in uneven shallow gasps.) 

Irris looks at the gaping wound. Looks at her hands. Looks at the dagger. Shrugs, and tries to carefully cauterize the worst-bleeding edges of the wound. 

She is basically covered in blood now. She hands the dagger back to Carissa and pinches the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes. Now there's blood all over her face too.