The comms staffperson, who has been hiking around on the rocks outside the cockpit, sticks his head back over. "We've got two more deteriorating over here. Fifteen minutes until backup." 

Irris is done, actually. Irris has already done too much cutting people into pieces and she is now done and someone else can do the rest

She takes a deep breath, and stands up. "Coming." 

"Nice work," says Carissa cheerfully to Irris, because that was pretty impressive non-squeamishness if she's not in the habit of cutting people up and she doesn't seem to be. 

She's back to cooling the heads. She has been told not to cool them past freezing so she's trying to get them all to near freezing and then rotate around keeping them there and if she has extra slack she adds cold rocks to the crate so it'll stay cold if she has to do something else.

If this IS a test, she thinks she should definitely pass, and if it's not a test hopefully people will be motivated to not assassinate her until they've learned her magic, which she will simply refuse to teach them.

Irris is not in the habit of cutting people up! She has, like, watched her daughter cut up lots of fake people, including literally with a sharp rock hand-axe that she had just made herself in a forest, because whoever designs Merrin's sims is just like that, is why. Real people is different and doing it herself is different and she's feeling pretty shaky, but - honestly, more about the screaming in agony than about the blood. 

She - nods back to the magic user because she has no idea how to respond to that otherwise???? Her social brain is not really entirely working right now. 

Older guy who lost a lot of blood and broke his femur was hanging on for a few minutes, but his heart is not really in any shape to keep this up, and he's ashen-faced and wheezing and slowly losing consciousness. 

(Irris tells someone to try supportive rescue breathing, though the lower O2 concentration in exhaled air is really not helping them out here. If Merrin were three minutes out rather than thirteen, she would have probably said they ought to start chest compressions at the point when they lose his pulse, because really soon they'll have a defibrillator and other equipment and IV fluids and drugs and Merrin could probably get him back. But they're not going to get much of a blood pressure with CPR given how little blood volume they have to work with, and 13 minutes of a blood pressure of 30/10 is, like, just definitely going to cause brain damage. Irris decapitates him with 12 minutes to go, and a sixth head joins the others in the box.)  

Another late-30s woman with her teenage children on either side of her, one lung clearly collapsed and filling with blood. 

(Merrin could fix that in like three minutes. Irris could at least stabilize the woman a bit with supplementary oxygen and IV fluids, if they had any more of that. As it is there's not much she can do other than Be Nearby With A Guillotine while the woman's daughters reassure her and exhort her to just keep trying to breathe, until she can't anymore, and she loses consciousness and it's pretty clear from her color that her blood oxygenation is plummeting, and rescue breathing is not going to get enough oxygen to her bloodstream to keep her heart beating for ten more minutes let alone keep her brain in reasonable condition. Irris decapitates her with 9 minutes to go. There are seven heads in a crate and she will have feelings about that AT A TIME THAT IS NOT NOW.) 

Young guy with the horrific rib injuries is struggling. He's still managing to get some air, and he's not completely unconscious, but he's no longer super able to understand or answer verbal questions. They are, at this point, basically just waiting around and hoping. 

(He turns bluer, stops responding to anything other than pain, but he somehow keeps breathing.) 

Radio instructions are for Irris to try literally shoving a shirt up through the miscarrying woman's cervix into her uterus, to try to put pressure on the hemorrhaging blood vessels; the casualty is pretty much no longer conscious and won't mind. Can Irris get someone else's shirt please. 

(The woman is in fact conscious to mind, and struggle ineffectively, and this is somehow one of the most upsetting things Irris has ever experienced in her entire life and SIGNIFICANTLY worse than hacking people's heads off which is, after all, SAVING THEM, and she keeps having to close her eyes and try not to throw up or cry or both at once, but she does it, and it at least slows the bleeding.) 

A fifteen-year-old boy who had actually only been considered disablingly injured and not critical is unlucky. They're not even sure what happened, but he deteriorates fast over a couple of minutes, and by the time someone flags this to Irris, his pupils are fixed and dilated and he's technically sort of breathing but they don't really know what's wrong and have no way to find out for seven more minutes and what's wrong could be "catastrophic bleeding in his skull." 

Eight heads in the crate now. 

They don't hear the Exception Handling cargo plane with airdrop capabilities approaching very far in advance, because it is after all moving at supersonic speeds. (The sonic boom trail will hit them afterward.) 

But it slows on approach, because Merrin jumping out at supersonic speed will not be great for Merrin even in full protective gear, and they'll hear it a few seconds before the flash of high up on the horizon, rapidly drawing closer. It's not especially bothering to descend from its current height of nearly 5000 meters.  Merrin can free-fall a ways, and then she does have a parachute and attitude-control jets on her suit. It's not safe for her to try to land too close to them, since she'll have an error radius of 10m and might land on someone, but she can land less than a thirty-second sprint away. 

From that height, and looking into the sun, the speck of a person isn't really visible yet. 

Irris and everyone else know what it means, though. 

"Two to three minutes until backup," she tells Carissa quietly, and then they're being frantically called over for another patient, a guy in his 40s who also has serious internal bleeding and they should probably do something about that before Merrin lands, since she has, like, ten other dying people to try to save. 

Can she get someone else's shirt to do the Horrifying Field Surgery Shirt Procedure. 

This one doesn't go well. There are, like, six different sources of bleeding, and one of them was probably sort of being controlled by the accumulated pressure of half-congealed blood in his abdominal cavity and is now NOT controlled and there is ARTERIAL SPURTING that sort of looks like it might literally be a tear in his aorta and Irris gets sprayed in the face, which is really not how she wanted her day to be going right now.

It was worth trying in expectation, probably (and Exception Handling radio support made the call, not her). The guy wasn't going to make it another five minutes and plausibly even Merrin couldn't have saved him starting in three minutes, and also like thirty seconds later they're making the call to add his head to the box, that's nine now, and Irris wasn't crying before but she is now. Quietcrying. The most dignified crying a person can possibly pull off when her hair is sopping wet with the blood of someone she sort of just...killed...if not counterfactually (and not a True Death), still proximately a result of an action she took. 

Wow, combat sucks when there aren't spellcasters around to blast everyone back to full health immediately. 

(Asmodeus? Your loyal servant would love some magic powers with which to survive the next day or so and deliver the world to you in glory so no one in it dies for real?)

She keeps the heads cold.

Merrin falls. 

She saw the best-resolution satellite coverage of what she's landing on. It wasn't that helpful; the resolution is to, like, 1m, it lets you see where there are people but not much about the condition of said people.

The ongoing radio reports are more informative. She was in direct contact with the comms staffperson on the ground for most of the last five minutes, being the one to actually absorb the prediction market Treatment Planning recommendations and relay them. 

Now she doesn't have screens – well, she has foldout screens in her pack, but for the actual estimated 2 minutes 25 seconds of controlled falling, only the not-very-high-resolution head-up helmet display and her radio, and approximately all of that commas bandwidth is dedicated to managing the drop itself, because - while Merrin has done this fifty times under worse conditions than this, after hundreds of iterations of working-up-to-it simulated training - the tolerances on it are in fact pretty tiny. She has no eyes or ears on what’s happening below. 

A fact about Merrin's psychology: 

One might reasonably consider that a maneuver that needs to be executed perfectly to within narrow tolerances, where if you get it wrong - and it's, like, probably not much lower than a 1 in 1000 risk of getting it a bit wrong - you are going to at the very least break quite a lot of bones and get a very unpleasant concussion, and if you get it badly wrong enough it's an emergency cryo scenario (and, in fact, it's theoretically possible, if significantly lower than a one in a million risk, that it could be a True Death scenario) - one might reasonably consider that a neurotypical person would find this really stressful, if not abjectly terrifying. 

Merrin is not someone who is particularly immune to fear. Merrin is, in fact, scared of a lot of things! She's scared of making mistakes because she's stupid. She's scared of saying really embarrassing things in front of Keepers, because working for Exception Handling means way more interaction with Keepers than is at all reasonable for someone like Merrin. She's scared of upsetting people by accidentally saying really inconsiderate things because her brain wasn't working after 12 hours of horrible sims. She's scared of making a mistake and being causally responsible for a fraction of a True Death somehow; she has nightmares about that one. She's scared that the last four years of working for Exception Handling turning out to have been an elaborate prank. She's honestly even more scared that it's not a prank and Exception Handling is just, like, making the wrong call, and should instead be training someone else who is better at things than her. 

Merrin is not scared of falling. It was pretty nervewracking the first time she threw herself out of a plane at 5000m while it was moving at just below the speed of sound. She was almost tempted to make someone push her, because having like a five second "safe" window to make herself jump was awful but she would have DIED of HUMILIATION if she had frozen up and missed the window entirely. 

But falling is just gravity. Merrin isn't afraid of the laws of physics. Merrin's subconscious is about a thousand times more afraid of "people deciding to try to hurt her" than of physical laws which might be coldly neutral but, like, the worst they'll do to her if she accidentally thinks she's better than she is at things than she really is, is that she'll break her bones, which is SO MUCH LESS BAD. Definitely Merrin's brain cannot manage to be scared of it after, like, the fourth time that she did it and it was completely fine. 

It feels almost peaceful, this high above the world. Merrin is the least stressed, for those two and a half precious minutes, than she has been since she got the call. If this were a sim, it would be genuinely fun. 

It's not a sim. She's still holding out SOME hope that it's a hallucination. Merrin is really really unhappy about the situation! Just, for a brief little while she can be deeply unhappy and also FLYING.

The two and half minutes is kind of almost over too soon. 

Above Carissa's head, a speck grows into what's more clearly a figure. 

Merrin deploys the parachute just above 1000m up. (It would be cutting it close for regular skydiving, but she is really practiced at this, and does not mind taking a lot of g-forces; in fact, it's sort of mentally clarifying for her.) The parachute is sort of designed to look like wings; actual wingsuits are not practical enough for this purpose to justify, even though it would be INCREDIBLY COOL.

Falling more slowly, she corrects her bearing a little, aiming herself for, like, around 40m away from the cluster of people. At just over 20m from the ground, she toggles the release on the parachute, and controls the remainder of her descent with jets alone. 

She is of course moving pretty fast when she lands, but the suit has awesome shock absorbers in the legs. (She's, like, seven feet tall in it.) 

She straightens up, takes a moment to check suit diagnostics and make sure nothing got futzed by the impact, and gauges her distance. More like 50m away, and while she can run super fast in this suit, the rocks are incredibly uneven.

Self-checks done and confirmed over radio by the techs watching her remote suit feed, she sprints toward the crash site. 

From Carissa's perspective: an almost winged-looking figure, larger than human and of indeterminate sex, comes howling down out of the sky. It lands in a crouch at a speed that looks like it should definitely kill someone. It straightens, holds still for a moment, and then heads for them at a running speed that also does not seem especially physically possible. It's wearing - something - that has the same sort of relationship to a really fancy magical suit of armor, that ordinary peasant clothing in Golarion has to the elaborate and impossibly high-quality garb that some of these people are wearing. 

Cool, the high level adventuring party that can make this problem go away and maybe kill or kidnap her to keep the secret of magic is here. ...kind of weird it's just a solo adventurer but maybe the others are invisible. Carissa looks around to see if anyone is bowing. She'll bow twenty percent less than everyone else.

(The others are not that far away! The closest tiny regional hospital with relevantly certed and sufficiently medtechs - who were expected to be able to handle "brains smeared across 50m of rocks" at least in the short term and to the extent of remaining functional - isn't that far, and their helicopter is maybe 15 min out. An Exception Handling specialty helicopter with a more thoroughly certed team of medtechs - and a full mobile hospital and cryo facility - is coming from further out, but it's a much faster helicopter and will get there in 18-20 minutes.

Carissa is probably going to be way less impressed with the medtechs not wearing power armor built for jumping out of barely-not-supersonic planes at 5000m of altitude, though.) 

Nobody is bowing to her at all. Most people aren't actually looking up; a few relatively less busy people who can walk are moving over to where it looks like she's headed. 

Merrin reaches them, slowing herself down with her jets before she's actually close enough to, like, burn anyone. She jogs the rest of the way at a non-dangerous pace. 

She flips back her helmet. It's not like this is an alien planet sim, the atmosphere is perfectly breathable, and it makes her feel like she has restricted peripheral vision even though this is not really true. 

(Carissa will notice that the face belongs to a young woman of maybe 24 or 25, looking grim but calmly focused.) 

She's already shrugging off her pack, which weighs like 100 kg and which she definitely could not carry if she weren't wearing power armor. Several relatively-uninjured people not actively in the middle of trying to prevent anyone from dying are already jogging over to help her unload her equipment and set up. 

SCREENS are her priority. And then this pack of medical sensors, here, person in blue shirt, you are designated as Blue and responsible for distributing these to five other people who can then go distribute them to anyone sitting with the more seriously injured casualties. Put them on yourself too, Merrin doesn't want to get blindsided by someone collapsing unexpectedly on her. 

"Status report," she says out loud, because this crew is not equipped with subvocalization microphones and earbuds. 

"Nine in cryo prep," the comms staffperson says, gesturing at Carissa's crate. "Five imminently dying 90%-odds-on-under-five-minutes. Seven at risk of imminent deterioration 80%-odds-next-15-minutes." 

(These are specialized jargon, emergency field trauma medicine compound phrases. The relatively inexperienced comms person only knows them because he's now spent a lot of minutes being coached by someone from Exception Handling via radio, even before talking to Merrin directly. He's sort of overawed about Merrin being here and is trying not to show it.) 

...He looks over at Carissa in case she has anything. 

(Irris is kneeling beside another deteriorating casualty. She hasn't moved. When she queries her brain for correct next actions, it keeps only giving her "hug Merrin and cry" and now is incredibly not the time.) 

Carissa has not been keeping track of the status of the casualties since they started giving her heads to keep cool. Instead she has her crate nice and cold and lined with rocks that are also nice and cold and her dagger is still shining brightly in case anyone needs to use it for lighting and she is mostly trying to think about how to survive the next 24 hours herself but keeps bouncing off how little she knows about this world.

(Carissa is scared, by now. She wasn't in the plane, but the plane was an ordinary sort of problem; this airship is crashing. She can fly. Once you can fly you don't need to be too scared of ordinary sorts of problems. Now she's here on the ground, keeping the heads cold, passing the test, and she has no idea which governments want her dead right now and which just want her theirs. She is, of course, not showing this.)

Probably from the look on High Level Adventurer's face she is not the one sent to make sure that there are no survivors of this incident that involved magic being demonstrated. So Carissa will just - let her do her job, then.

No one else seems to be bowing. She - nods. Respectfully. Respectful nod. That's a reasonable human communication, hopefully.

Everyone is continuing to be really incredibly obedient and cooperative and efficient! They might not be bowing to the new arrival but they are very definitely deferring to her, and doing exactly what she says the moment she says it. Within ten seconds, people are jogging over the rocks to distribute O2 saturation and ECG sensors, the basic bare minimum monitoring; EEG sensors are more annoying to place, more challenging to place exactly right, and require head shaving. 

"Mom! Can you be on EEG-ing people?" Merrin calls out, and then momentarily dies of embarrassment internally because she just called her mom "Mom" out loud and everything she says and does is being recorded, including by a quadcopter drone that detached from the back of her suit when she toggled that part of her suit and is now flying around getting footage from more different angles. 

One advantage of having blood dripping down your face is that it adds a lot more plausible deniability regarding the question of whether you were crying thirty seconds ago. Irris calls over someone else to replace her on holding pressure on bleeding, and runs over to collect the box of EEG electrodes and the electric shaver.