The next thing that happens is more surprising. 

Actually, that's understating it. Asteroids striking plane engines, or whatever happened here, happen one time in a billion, maybe.

Wizards from other universes getting Plane Shifted into yours by a mis-cast combat spell should happen never. 

And yet here she is. Her uniform is a bit singed, and she looks like she's recently been engaged in serious physical exertion.

She has (it might be relevant) some spells prepared:

Prestidigitation, Light, Mage Hand, Detect Magic, Comprehend Languages, Feather Fall, Secluded Grimoire, Infernal Healing, Rope Trick, Resist Energy, Summon Monster 2, Greater Detect Magic, Fly, Tongues, and Haste. 

She looks around confusedly. 

She's in the aisle of a passenger airplane! It is, for someone from Golarion, not an especially familiar scene!

The "room" she finds herself in is – long, and narrow, and sort of disconcertingly tube-shaped. The floor is covered in pleasantly-textured carpet. On either side, there are rows of - weirdly shaped sofas? The aisle between them is wide enough for someone to walk comfortably through – under normal conditions, at least, which these are not, because the entire "room" is shaking and shuddering around her and there is a definite sensation of falling. 

There's a middle-aged woman staring at her! She's holding a small child in her lap. She looks incredibly confused. 

"....Tsi-imbi?" she says. 

That doesn't make any sense but there's an obvious explanation for that! She casts Tongues, and - looks for an exit, she's not exactly getting the vibe she's supposed to be here - "sorry, sorry," she says in the same language, "Uh, I got lost by accident, I can pay my way back, I didn't meant to intrude -"

Irris is really confused and would honestly be tempted to tsi-imbi again about it, except that she literally just did five seconds ago, and in the relevant situations where she is actually having a psychotic break which would be so much better than the current situation, it's both unnecessary and undignified. And in the situation where this is real, it...still won't help. 

"...I don't understand how you could possibly have gotten here by accident," she says.

Her voice is surprisingly calm, even to herself. Maybe it helps that she still has a four-year-old in her lap and part of her is instinctively focused on not scaring him.

"I - I'm sorry, I don't - actually think there's an obvious way for you to pay to get out of this."

Since, you know, Merrin is actually pretty wealthy even if Irris is far more aware of this fact than her daughter is, and even knowing that she has that resource to draw on, Irris is still not expecting to survive this. 

"...I - distracted and low on verbal processing - I am wondering if you're somehow missing more context than what I initially assumed?" 

"I'm sorry, I don't actually think there's an obvious way for you to pay to get out of this" is the politest death threat Carissa has ever heard but it's definitely a death threat.

"I don't have any context," she says tightly, looking around to see who's going to drag her off for unauthorized appearing in this location.

No one is looking especially inclined to drag her off for her unauthorized appearance! Basically everyone in line-of-sight is really incredibly distracted.

(There were a few other tsi-imbi claims, but not necessarily audibly to Carissa, since even without working engines, the air friction on the plane is making a lot of noise.) 

....You know who would be way better at dealing with this? Her daughter.

Who is not here. Who will maybe be summoned frantically to the site of the accident, but probably still an hour too late not exactly a wrongthought but that sure is an unhelpful thought to keep repeatedly dwelling on. 

"...Give me the most-efficiently-compressed-assuming-no-shared-expertise* explanation of what context you do currently have?" she says, while petting the small child's hair. 

*A three-syllable word in Baseline.

"I'm a combat wizard with Her Majesty's Eleventh deployed at Seer's Rest at the Worldwound, from the country of Cheliax... on the planet Golarion... in the Material Plane... in Pharasma's Creation....?"

....

.........

.................

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

"Tsi-imbi...?"

Carissa really hopes that's not Infernal which she's supposed to know. It's said like something she's supposed to know. 

She'll ....look around the hallway. Still no one coming to kill her for unauthorized hallway presence? If no one saw her but this woman maybe she can strangle this woman, impersonate her, and act like she was meant to be in this hallway.

...is this hallway on a boat? It's really bumpy.

Nobody looks especially inclined to kill her? 

There are a lot of people around her, though! At least a dozen (terrified-looking) people have line of sight on her. Most of them are either looking terrified without actually looking in her direction, or else clearly not at all sure what to do about her sudden appearance. 

(One person is sending a message on the within-plane cellular-texter network to the copilot's assistant, which...also starts with "tsi-imbi" but then describes exactly what physically-impossible event she just observed.) 

Also! Irris, having noticed that (unsurprisingly, at this point) she has not been sedated by medtechs due to successfully flagging a psychotic episode, is now trying to respond to the actual situation again. 

This random person seems to be CORRECT that she has zero context! For such interesting reasons! Irris is going to have to think fast about what to tell her. While also keeping the small child from panicking, but that at least is something she feels qualified for. 

Also maybe the sheer weirdness of "an alien from another world just appeared on a crashing plane" means this is actually just an Exception Handling practice scenario and no one will really actually permanently die

"...I am starting to wonder if you're from a completely different world," she manages to say. "I - don't recognize any of the locations or - Governance departments? - that you just named. And magic-users are only fictional, here, as far as I know." 

Pause. 

She lowers her voice, for the benefit of the scared child in her lap. 

"- We are currently on a passenger airplane* which just had a serious unexpected malfunction and we - are very likely going to crash in a few minutes. And - and it's a True Death scenario**, they - it doesn't look like anyone will get to the site in time to salvage our brains - I'm so sorry...." 

*Translates roughly as "powered mechanical flying device for passenger transport."
**Translates as "complete soul-destruction." 

"This is an ...airship? And it's going to crash? And you ...don't have wizards around here?

- right, okay, I can do eight in a pocket dimension and five in a Feather Fall, have you got a chain of command or should I - take bids -"

See, the issue is that Merrin would KNOW THE ANSWER to this instantly and her mind would not spin in momentary blank confusion instead. What are those...spells? Irris doesn't read enough fantasy-genre for this. 

The confusion is a lot longer than momentary, but the freezing-up about it isn't. 

"The comms person should be in contact with Exception Handling, they'll - I don't know, I assume they're already - sending someone even though ti probably wouldn't work - you should–" 

She should be prioritizing faster than this, actually, they only have a few minutes. She isn't sure how many minutes. She - should maybe be trying to verify any of what this random woman is saying, except that if Irris isn't just insane, this random woman definitely did just appear from nowhere, and - actually Irris should be handing this off to someone who reasons faster than her–

She scoops the kid into her arms and stands up, and sings "EXCEPTION!" with the legally restricted prosody and melody, and then takes a deep breath.

"I perceived this woman appearing from nowhere, she claims to be from a setting with - some form of economicmagic - that she can help - if everyone else can also see her then we need to - pass word, hear what her magic does - spin up Prediction Markets if we have time -" 

And she sits down, because standing up is a bad way to be in case of (even more than the expected) turbulence. 

Irris is not actually doing terribly on reaction speed here! She's not that far below average on raw processing speed, there is one first-rank Keeper on this plane who is sitting at the front, in the dark, in a noisy environment, and did not really have a way to find out about Carissa's appearance before someone pulled it together enough to tell her. And Irris has the advantage of spending a lot more time exposed to and thinking about weird Exception Handling scenarios, if not so much actively training on them. 

Still, someone is already urgently calling over the passenger with a vaguely-relevant background who volunteered as an assistant to the comms person, to triage and filter any potentially clever ideas from the other passengers. 

Also! This small child has in fact read a lot of fantasy! He wriggles around to stare at Carissa. "Does the Feather Fall make you hover or does it just slow acceleration? Does it work on things that aren't people? Does the pocket dimension attach to something physical or to you or does someone need to come back for it?" 

Probably this questioning should not mostly be run by a small child, even if that small child seems to have spent fewer total seconds hesitating and doubting his own sanity than several nearby people! 

Someone else jumps in. "Actually if it would take less than twenty seconds could we get a list of all of the magic you can do - in case there's a clever solution or something Exception Handling can work with -" 

(Exception Handling has not yet been notified, because triage-and-relay takes more than five seconds and the comms person is now sufficiently in doubt that he's really on a plane at all to tsi-imbi on the comms link first, before launching pretty much immediately into an explanation.) 

Carissa smiles involuntarily at the tiny child -- those are good questions! - but takes orders from the adult.

"My cantrips are little spells I can use as often as I want. Prestidigitation sorts or colors or cleans the material it targets. Light makes a visible-light" why would a language apparently have specific vocabulary for visible-light. Distinct from what, invisible-light? "Mage Hand lets me exert about a hand's worth of force at a distance. Detect Magic lets me see magic. 

Comprehending anything spoken or written, self-only, sixty minutes - uh, a round is this long, one, two, three, four, five, six, a minute's ten of them -

Feather Fall, six human-or-relevantly-similar-in-a-respect-where-everyone-I-observe-is-relevantly-similar targets-selected-by-me-in-a-purely-mental-action” she is not at all sure she’s wielding this language properly! “...within twenty feet of all other targets and, if I’m not one of the targets,  forty feet of me, lasts six rounds, it changes your speed to sixty feet per round, you start falling again in whatever manner people fall on this planet - that’s one of those things that’s different on different planets - at the end if you haven't reached the ground by then. It works on objects but they'd have to be the size of an elephant or smaller.  It works on objects with people in them but you'll get smashed against the object when its speed changes.

Secluded Fantasy-textbook-on-magic-personal-use, hides my spellbook in hyperspace, only works on specially treated paper.

Doomiest healing, touch range, over the course of a minute it heals -” does the language not have a word for ‘peasant’ or ‘civilian’ - well, it wouldn’t distinguish the kinds of people who can soak up tons of healing and the kinds who can’t, if no one can do healing - “for humans-who-aren’t-exceptions it heals anything that hasn't killed you, for humans-who-are-exceptions it at least gets you back on your feet.”  She’s pretty sure those was the wrong words to use but she’s not going to try again right now.

“Rope Trick, takes six to thirty feet of rope, builds a ten feet a side cube pocket dimension at the top of the rope in which up to eight humans-or-relevantly-similar can shelter. The rope can support a lot of weight but not arbitrary weight and I don't know the amount. More than a” they don’t have oxen apparently, or mules?  “...quadrupedal domestic plow animal, less than...thirty quadrupedal domestic plow animals? The rope anchors the pocket dimension to the frame of reference it's cast in" she was just trying to say that it, you know, moves with ships if it's on ships. Hopefully that's what she said?" "and the rope can't be moved by ordinary force once the spell is cast unless you apply enough force to break the spell. The airship crashing would I expect not affect people inside the Rope Trick."

Resist energy, single target, sixty minutes, prevents damage from electricity, fire, sound, cold, or acid, pick one.  Summon-fantasy-creature 2, summons a magically projected artificial form which is operated by an entity from a nearby dimension, six rounds, it can get a dog or an air elemental or a weak standard-native-entity-to-an alternate plane at home but I don't know if you have the same Inner and Outer planes as us.

Greater Detect Magic, self-only, six minutes, I can see magic, useless if there isn't magic around here. Fly, self-only" (this is a lie, but if she's on a failing airship she's not about to let herself get forced to use her Fly spell on someone else) "six minutes, lets me fly, that's with normal - uh, it works the way you'd expect flying to work if you grew wings that could lift you, not the way Feather Fall works. You don't grow wings though. Tongues, what I'm using to speak this language, sixty minutes, self-only. Haste, improves six peoples' reflexes and reaction times  for six rounds. I'll need it if you want me to time the feather fall right with humans-who-aren’t-exceptions - uh, humans who can't survive forty, fifty feet of error in timing the Feather Fall."

This is now being relayed in real time to the Exception Handling Emergency Communications Relay.

There was already rather a lot of global attention on the situation, even before a magic user from an alternatephysics setting apparently accidentally teleported onto the crashing plane. It was previously pretty unlikely that even the full resources Exception Handling can bring to bear would be enough to save anyone on the plane, but they were going to try. 

(Merrin has been hastily extracted from a date and is en route to the predicted crash site on the fastest supersonic plane stationed in Default and that can do an aerial drop. She's certed on doing a controlled aerial drop and landing in power armor; she can get down to the site without the fast plane having to find a place to land, or do more than slightly slow down. Given the speed at which the damaged passenger plane is losing altitude, she is going to be – would have been – 20 minutes too late, but - maybe barely in time to determine which if any of the casualties might not have died instantly, might have retained circulation for a few precious minutes despite catastrophic injuries, whose brains might still be salvageable... There are helicopters of backup coming from other locations, medical and other personnel, but helicopters aren't supersonic, and Merrin is going to get there first.) 

Being dragged away mid-date into a literal nightmare scenario is really incredibly jarring! Being dragged away mid-date because the plane that her MOTHER is on is CRASHING due to a FREAK ACCIDENT INVOLVING A METEORITE, in an effort that will almost certainly be futile, is worse than jarring. Merrin is hoping that she can wrestle her brain into at least being more focused by the time she has to jump out of a transport plane flying just barely below the speed of sound and land on rocky dangerous terrain and then almost certainly fail to do anything to prevent around a hundred True Deaths. 

Exception Handling will wait two minutes on sending Merrin an update, because while it may be a miraculously positive update, it's also weird and confusing, and the consensus is that Merrin is not really going to be processing weird and confusing inputs at her usual capacity until it's been more than like three minutes since she was yoinked from a date. 

They don't have very much time to come up with a plan. When the apparent magic user appeared, the plane had maybe four minutes left in the air. They have nonzero control even with an entire wing disabled, though, and the plan is now shifting from "try to land with as little momentum as possible", in hopes of a controlled crash that might not kill everyone instantly. Now it looks like they - should maybe be trying a plan that gives them as much remaining airtime as possible? 

Prediction markets are spinning up and they have a team of Exception Handling strategic-improvisation experts quickly trying to generate as many variations as possible of plans that incorporate the various claimed magical abilities as they hear about them. Most of them will be terrible, but it makes sense to separate out the brainstorming step, and let the markets decide which plans are obviously doomed and which are worth looking into. They need time, though. 

Lists of questions are already being put together for the magic user, and there's time for ten seconds of prediction market activity on prioritizing the order of questions, because the time to answer is an intensely limited resource. 

(And, of course, there's already a priority list being generated for, if they can't get everyone out alive - even if they do manage to come up with a plan whereby Merrin can collect the cold intact heads of everyone else - who goes first for space in the pocket dimension or gets Feather Fall'd. It's based on a number of factors: advance directives, how much each person's insurance will pay to save their life, additional funding from employers or families, and whether Governance has a specific interest in keeping this person alive rather than in cryo. Merrin's Financial Advisor and at least one of Merrin's boyfriends are putting in rather large bids for her mother to be high on the priority list, but Exception Handling might have made that call anyway, given that Merrin will be on the scene a solid fifteen or twenty minutes before anyone else, and may have to triage and treat serious injures even if she doesn't have to parallel-handle some stupidly large number of emergency cryo procedures. A protocol is frantically being adapted for her, because although Exception Handling sim-scenario-writers are extremely creative, they have not specifically done "you arrive on the scene and find 50-90 chilled heads in a pocket dimension".) 

The volunteer onboard-comms-assistant is now back over at Carissa's end of the plane, with an earpiece and a radio link with the main flight comms person. (The electronics needed for high-bandwidth information transfer usable by passengers were damaged in the incident.) Other passengers have arranged to move around so that he can secure himself in a seat, and point at the one beside it for Carissa. 

"Try to keep answers under ten seconds per question," he says. "Does using your magic require concentration that emergency maneuvers would interrupt, and-or will your top current plans be compromised by a higher-speed crash impact. If not we can buy longer airborne to prepare." 

"I can... cast in combat? I'm iffy if I'm actively on fire. I...wasn't assuming anything about how fast your airship was crashing."

(That seems really concerning???? Is being able to function while on fire, like, an expectation that her society has of magic users?????? Also nobody is ever allowed to mention this to Merrin because she's definitely competitive enough to request a sim where she has to treat patients while on fire, especially once she learns about the existence of magic healing even if it's for some reason doompunk-themed magic healing)

"Not anticipating fire pre-crash, can minimize fire risk post-crash by dumping fuel. Anticipate turbulence and sudden-changes-in-acceleration-over-all-planes*. Will assume that if well secured you can concentrate through that, moving-on-to-save-time-unless-you-interrupt-to-indicate-otherwise**."

There's a brief pause, no more than a second or two, while he waits to hear the next-highest-priority questions. 

"Can any of your spells be adapted to render and keep objects - or ideally a whole area like the pocket dimension - cold."

*Three-syllable word.

*One-syllable word. 

Carissa feels stupid, somehow, as if all of this is assuming she's a ninth circle wizard wearing the fanciest of headbands though obviously if she was she'd have fixed their stupid airship by now. It's like everything is crafted so that she can barely keep up with it and unpack it within the ten seconds she's allotted to answer it. 

Amazing how she can be bad at languages even with Tongues up. She does not like it. 

"Uh, Prestidigitation can chill a cup of water or an object of a similar size. I don't have...cold-based combat spells prepared..."

(Well, yes, Exception Handling is crafting every question to cover as much ground as possible, as fast as possible, on the assumption of "approximately median thinkoomph" because as of yet none of their observations contradict that, and they really don't have a lot of time. No dath ilani would feel stupid in a socially painful way about an emergency pushing them to their cognitive limits.) 

The man nods. 

"Might be sufficient. Would a head be close enough in size to a glass of water to be doable, and what temperature could you get it down to, and how long would that take." And then because Exception Handling apparently thinks it would be helpful for her to have the context on why they need to know this, "- if we can't design a plan that gets everyone out alive, but we can keep everyone else's heads undamaged and cooled until backup arrives on-site, we can probably ensure their brains are intact enough for cryopreservation."

(The last word doesn't directly correspond to any Golarion vocabulary. The connotation it matches closest is Flesh to Stone? There's a sense that, while it isn't a Resurrection, it...makes the person resurrectable in theory? When they would not otherwise be?) 

Carissa is very confused for a moment - what kind of resurrection specifically requires the cold head of the dead person - but most spells are kind of nonsense and she does not really have time to think -

- except they said, earlier, 'this is a true death situation', like they thought their souls would be destroyed, and things were moving too fast for her to think about but - "uh, clarification, what's the afterlife* situation here? I can probably use prestidigitation to make a head cold - if there's, uh, four minutes, that's forty Prestidigitations even if that's all I did -"

*this is NOT two syllables. It comes out 'alternatephysics where ontologically-basic-minds experience awakening on their body's destruction'. 

...just checking mentally, is there a shorter than that phrase for 'Hell' or 'the Boneyard' or 'Axis' or anything.

Not really! Baseline doesn’t have compound-word-phrases that would single out Axis or Heaven or Elysium or Abaddon or the Abyss or the Boneyard. She could coin a compound phrase - Tongues thinks that’s a thing you can just do, in this language - but would have to basically just describe the key details directly.

Tongues will suggest a couple of possible proper noun phrases that are vaguely close? For Nirvana, there is a fairly obscure children’s TV show in a fictional setting where you can cross through a portal into an idyllic wilderness alternatephysics setting and in the process be transformed into magical animals, but it doesn’t have the afterlife connotation (and, while Tongues is not going to unpack the plot of the show for her, the connotations definitely indicate that it’s fictional.)

A popular long-running web serial has a Plane Of Primordial Chaos that one might consider to resemble the Maelstrom, with the conceit that mind-souls both come from and return to it. 

And, for some reason, there is a compound-phrase that comes to mind immediately for Hell. The concept is considered heavily infohazardous; nobody on this plane (and just about no one outside the Basement) knows it, but it’s what nearly all Baseline speakers would converge on if Hell were described to them. It would translate approximately as “infohazard-infinite-torture-mind-experience-dimension”.

(Behind the scenes: Exception Handling needs a probability spread right now on how much airtime they can buy themselves via insane risky maneuvers, to decide if they can afford to workshop other plans that might keep everyone alive or if they need to pull the trigger on this one right superheated now.)

Well that's the wrong concept, Hell isn't eternal torture, it's just torture until you stop sucking. 

....so the crucial question is do these people not have afterlives or do they just because they don't have magic not know that they have afterlives. 

....if they have head-based resurrection they should at least know whether any heads went to an afterlife? 

Does Carissa get a normal afterlife if she dies here -

(Tongues cannot actually answer that for her. It can at best hint at the absence of an answer, by failing to provide any words that correspond exactly to her current situation.)

Piloting experts are looking at options for taking control of the plane’s remaining controls remotely, to execute a very difficult series of aerial maneuvers that random commercial airline pilots are really not certed on. 

Initial probability spread is back, albeit tentative.

“20% / 50% / 80% on remaining airtime 4 minutes 45 seconds, 5 minutes 25 seconds, 6 min 10 seconds,” the comms volunteer says very fast, in the manner of someone using a common, basic syntactic construction that he expects even the tiny child to follow without difficulty. 

(An overhead speaker announcement is being made, telling passengers to prepare themselves for a potential Plan which will be described in 30 seconds and initiated in 45 seconds if trigger conditions are met. Airline staff are frantically trying to repurpose food-storage crates to instead hold heads. They do have a basic cryo-initiation kit, for the unlikely case of an instantly-fatal medical emergency while flying over remote areas; they don’t have anyone trained to a high level on the full medical procedure, but they have the emergency decapitation kit, and that step should not actually take longer than the length of time Carissa needs for her field.)

“Tentative timeline 45 seconds for alternate planning,” the comms relay says tightly. “How would this interact with the plan for the Feather Fall and pocket dimension - what time interval do we need to reserve—”

Carissa is still not clear on what their plan is!! Or what the question is! She wouldn't even be sure it was directed at her except that she's being looked at expectantly! Also she has no idea what to make of the numbers being read with apparently nonmagical amplification!!! 

"Uh, I can't use Prestidigitation to freeze heads and cast other spells at the same time?" she says.

Blink blink. Right. The magic user from a fantasy setting is obviously not going to be used to emergency comms protocols.

“There are 96 people on this plane. We should have time to confirm-or-rule-out other plans but. If our best plan involves Feather Fall for five - six? do you need one on yourself or can you do the flying? - and eight in a pocket dimension and the remaining heads in crates,   so 82-83, how many seconds do you need to cast all of the relevant spells including the one for reflexes.”

Ah, see, formulated like that it's a question a normal person might ask if they were timing an attack. "I can cast Rope Trick Fly Haste Feather Fall in twenty-four seconds and only the timing of the last one needs to be precise. I don't need to be in the Feather Fall, I'll be flying, though if your crashing airship is crashing faster than 10 feet per second then I will swiftly get behind it once I've jumped out and the Feather Fall people should jump out approximately with me. I don't know exactly how fast I can freeze a head, I can try one now if you need something more precise than that -" 

…They are not actually ready to decapitate someone as a test, Exception Handling has several questions lined up to check possible alternate plans that get everyone to the ground alive. 

Irris can toss the comms relay her water bottle. 

Who offers it to Carissa. “We’ll measure the final temperature - will the effect be different on a larger object with different water content—”

(Exception Handling wants to flag that answering one of the magic user’s questions got dropped and it might be important.)

“—Jumping back, we have no knowledge of afterlives* and believe our physical laws are not compatible with ontologically basic mind-souls, and minds are fully destroyed when brains are.” 

(*The full Baseline phrase, said very fast.)

"Okay, another thing, some people here should be praying for Asmodeus to notice this place and fix that!!"

(She Prestidigitates the water bottle. It's dropping temperature by about 1 degree Celsius/second.)

To cool 82 heads in 3 minutes 30 seconds (reserving 24 seconds and a tiny margin of wiggle room for other spells), if Carissa can in fact only do one at a time, that’s 2.5 degrees of cooling.

(With fifteen seconds per, they can get the heads to within the temperature range actually recommended for delayed-initiation-of-full-cryo-protocol - this is where the 50% probability estimate lands on “enough to significantly decrease the damage occurring in the 25-30 minute interval before Merrin can start the cryo procedure”, assuming that the initial cooling is the only intervention done. But they could only get 14 of the heads in that time range.) 

They would get all of the heads anyway. Decapitating heads is not bottlenecked on the magic user, "heads packed in insulating crate" are much more portable than living people and much more likely to make it through a crash intact, and they can if necessary, probably, dedicate some of the space in the pocket dimension for heads instead of full-size living people. Even 30 minutes sitting around warm is probably not enough for full information-theoretic death of the brain in question; there will be huge amounts of damage, of course, far beyond the point where they could expect to get someone back via existing medical tech even if they weren't a decapitated head, but - they think - not enough to fully erase them as an individual, not permanently, not for the rest of the Future. And their magic user, who will be flying and thus uninjured, can hopefully continue on cooling them after the landing. 

- more relevantly though, the conversation ate 15 seconds of their precious countdown. And now their magic user is saying something incredibly baffling that might be important, and will also take way longer than 15 seconds to clarify! 

Message for comms relay: prioritize question to check feasibility of their top-ranked Alternate Plan #1.

“Coming back to that. Question one: can the pocket dimension be cast at a fixed reference point in the air rather than the plane body, if we open the ceiling hatch. Question two: would the weight limit on the rope be higher with a stronger rope.”

"Yes and no."

…Promising. Worth a few more seconds of workshopping, though they are at this point very, very aware that, if they don’t sort out a plan that saves everyone, fifteen seconds of delay may add up to an additional True Death.

(Exception Handling is doing some quick calculations on the probable approximate weight of ??domestic quadrupedal plow animals?? which are - probably at least four times the weight of humans? possibly a lot more but this is a safe-ish lower bound according to all the consensus of relevant experts? Which means that if the real weight limit is toward the higher end of the weight estimate given, they - should actually be able to support everyone, but not any of the plane, meaning no harnesses, no protection against sudden deceleration… But at the lower end, they might only be able to take, like, 4-10 people. And figuring out how to attach everyone to a 30 foot rope at all in four minutes is going to be cutting things pretty close.)

Followup questions are relayed within seconds.

“Further question, can it be cast on the reference frame of an object targetable by Feather Fall.”

Carissa is not sure she understands that question either! "Uh, I can't Feather Fall your whole airship, it's too big. I can Feather Fall something...twenty, thirty feet across, if you have one. The Rope Trick's going to use wherever the rope is when I start the spell for its frame of reference."

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. 

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.

It’s dark and quiet in the pocket dimension, and Irris doesn’t really want to think about what’s in that box, but - she can do this. And at least she’ll have a minute or two when no one can see her cry

Carissa will have to figure all that out later - It's obviously extremely important to her long term survival here but it's not very likely to be relevant in the next ninety seconds. Presumably people are signaling political affiliation in some way and it'll be tremendously fraught either to do it or not do it and there'll be assassination attempts from the wrong side, but she has an excuse for not having declared her faction yet and probably no one has the resources for an assassination right this minute. 

She waits patiently for orders.

"Placing your radio earbud," the comms person says, and shows Carissa something and taps his own ear to indicate what he's about to do, before - poking the thing into her ear? It seems to be made of flesh-conforming gel, and sticks there. "Will activate post-explosive charges. No controls -" there was no time to train her on them, "- bone conduction microphone, we can contact you and receivers will hear anything you say." 

The seconds count down. 

They are trying to do a very difficult thing, here, and it even had a 9 in 10 chance of working, but - sometimes you get unlucky. 

They're not going to make it to the go-ahead point. 

The specialist team piloting the plane remotely is not going to know exactly what went wrong. A lot of the plane's external sensors were fried by the initial impact, and they have satellite coverage but it's not that high-resolution. It could be any of half a dozen different additional mechanical failures, as some system that was more damaged than they had realized deteriorates further under the strain of the sort-of-unreasonable maneuvers they're demanding of the damaged plane. 

(It's, like, 10, seconds before the go-ahead point. They did still buy a lot longer in the air than they would have expected by default.) 

It takes less than three seconds after the sudden jarring jolt and drastically increased turbulence noticeable by Carissa, for the on-site pilots and remote pilots to be sure that they are no longer in control and have no realistic way of regaining control. Another second to make the final decision. A second longer than that for the communication to be relayed. Four, five seconds total. 

"Haste and Fly and ready for Feather Fall on cue," the comms relay volunteer snaps out to Carissa, and then "EVERYONE MOVE NOW!" as he dives for the cockpit area.

Carissa is, actually, not that stressed. She'd rather these people not die, obviously, especially if they turn out not to have afterlives, but she's not going to get worked up in a combat situation; she can be sad some other time, if there's anything to be sad about. Her part is far from the hardest thing she's ever done; she can cast some spells on cue while people are dying all around her.

She does Fly then Haste because she bets they forgot Fly has the longer duration by far. 

(If there were literally any time for communication, Exception Handling would be in agreement - they were unsure how much to model that Haste would improve her spellcasting. But also it was sort of taken for granted that she would switch the order if she thought that was best.) 

The situation is not ideal! Both their altitude and forward speed are a lot higher than they would ideally be. Feather Fall buys them about 110 meters of controlled "fall".

The original plan was to stall out on purpose, let the plane fall slightly, trigger the explosion, and trigger the explosion just a little above the max Feather Fall range. They would let the new aerodynamic forces on the capsule convert some of its forward velocity into upward acceleration (not enough to cancel out the falling speed but enough to decrease it, and with rough but non-literally-instantaneous acceleration) and cast the Feather Fall such that it would, within their bounds of error, give at most 2 seconds of free fall at the end, and from a starting vertical speed of at most 25 m/s. They do want to buy as most Feather Fall airtime as possible, for air resistance on the suddenly very un-aerodynamic cockpit capsule to cut their forward momentum.

Their current altitude is...more than that. Though they just lost like half of the remaining sensors, satellite coverage is from directly above so impaired in detecting the plane's exact height from the ground, and the new error estimate is more like 40m.

Their current fall speed - downward velocity - is around 10m per second. Feather Fall will slow them to a little over 3 m/s. That is a lot of sudden change. The hope had been that braking, sacrificing much of the forward momentum keeping them in the air at all, would cut that massively. But the plan was to do it somewhat closer to the ground. 

...The way that they've now lost control is sort of a very half-assed version of the braking maneuver, and the pilots are about to throw literally every control they still have until helping that along, while they still can. 

This isn't the world they wanted to be in! 

There would have been small improvements in the injury odds on the prediction markets if this had gone as they so desperately hoped it would. About a 2% decrease in risk of minor injuries, 3% in major injuries.

But, correspondingly, there are some large negative updates now. 

Major injuries

Safest 22 people

Moderate injuries 48%

Major injuries 37%

Middle 37 people

Moderate injuries 78%

Major injuries 42%

Least safe 29 people

Moderate injuries 93%

Major injuries 52%

This is getting to a point where they really cannot expect to have enough able-bodied bystanders to treat all of the lethally injured casualties with even the most basic first aid. 

But, although this wasn't the world they wanted to be in, Exception Handling has nonetheless planned for it. 

They still have a last-ditch braking maneuver. They think it's 60% likely to at-least-sort-of work. 3:2 odds. 

If it works, and sacrifices forward speed for lift, both of these things are actually working hard in their favor, and it will buy them around a 2% decrease in minor injuries and 4% decrease in major injuries across all groups. If it doesn't work, though, they're looking and 3% and 6% increases respectively. 

....This plane is in really terrible shape. No, it cannot super do a braking maneuver right now. Something happened but it's not, like, helpful. 

Well. It was only slightly more likely than not to work. 

They're going to trigger the explosives now. They're still too high. They're still moving too fast. However much they manage to cut the falling speed, they then...need to fall to a height where they can cast Feather Fall and expect it to last until they hit the ground. 

The plane is less in control than it would have been. This maneuver was, like, 95% likely to work basically like in the simulations under the hoped-for (if not ideal) conditions. These...are not those conditions. It's, like, 80% likely to work. 

It's not really going to change the odds of minor injury much. Exploding a plane at this speed is going to, by itself, be a cause of significant minor injuries! Say, like, a 0.5% decrease in risk (or a 2% increase).

Major injury is a bigger deal, though, because "exactly how fast are they falling when their magic user casts Feather Fall" is such a huge input. It's going to affect the most thoroughly and safely secured cohort the least, though. Maybe a 1% decrease versus 4% increase. The medium group will see a bigger impact: the predictions (made in advance, they're not fast enough to update in real-time now) are of a 3% decrease or 12% increase. The worst-hit group - most of whom are, in fact, not really super secured at all - a 5% decrease or 20% increase. 

The doors to the cockpit slam, hiding the last remaining scramble of people inside. 

The overhead plane intercom makes its last announcement, for Carissa's benefit; to reduce the low-but-not-nonexistent risk of an electrical spark disabling the earbud and microphone setup that the comms volunteer gave her, they're going to remotely switch it on after the explosive charges go off. 

"Brace for explosive charge, tick five*." 

*Tongues makes it pretty clear that this is a countdown. 

Carissa took off and hovered as soon as she cast Fly; it's just less stressful than trying to keep her footing on the shivering quaking airship, and as soon as the shivering quaking airship explodes she's going to need to get clear of it and stay close enough to the fast-moving cockpit section to Feather Fall it. 

She doesn't know what she's going to do with her thousands of slaves but she does feel that she has very much earned them, here, if she gets them all landed. 

The explosion is close enough to Carissa to be deafening. It's actually very contained; she can see a brief sear of blue-white sparks in a ring just behind where the cockpit doors closed, feel the heat momentarily on her skin, but it doesn't even come close to injuring her. 

- and then the whole world is spinning and the rear of the plane is crumpling, metal screaming, torn away by gale-force winds, and unless Carissa very quickly dives away - like, in under a second - she's going to end up slammed against the closed doors and then flipped around, as the cockpit section, neither aerodynamic nor with any form of propulsion, starts to slow and flip its nose toward the sky. 

There's open air all around her. It's not actually cold, in this region, but the wind is practically sandblasting her. The ground feels simultaneously too close and very very far away. 

As far as the Exception Handling remote tactical team can tell, working from simulations being fed their really limited plane-sensor data plus a live-updating satellite feed of the crashing plane from above, that....worked? That sure is a plane coming apart. The cockpit and nosecone section looks intact, and is spinning away from the sacrificed, now-fragmenting remainder of the plane. 

That was, like, 6-7 seconds all told. They're now not that far above the Feather Fall-able altitude, plus or minus way more error than anyone would prefer.

But the cockpit capsule is, in fact, flipping up so that the nose faces the sky, rapidly losing at least some of that forward velocity that they were really not supposed to have because the plane was supposed to have been able to brake, and it's...not quite at a standstill but they're not falling very fast at all, maybe at 1m/second. 

It's not going to stay that way for long at all.

Carissa has Haste up! Carissa can dive away VERY FAST! Carissa can dive with the cockpit to stay in Feather Fall range! Carissa wouldn't have been able to give you a probability she could do any of those things but they're, you know, combat wizard things, you don't live to 23 if you fuck up at them five percent of the time. 

If only she had two Feather Falls their lives would be so easy from here. 

Unbeknownst to Carissa, there have been some prediction market updates on odds of injury. A negative update when the plane failed to brake, then a (small) positive update when the explosive detonation went basically as hoped. 

Safest cohort

Moderate injury 50.50%

Major injury 42%

Middle cohort

Moderate injury 70.50%

Major injury 45%

Least safe cohort

Moderate injury 95.50%

Major injury 53%

From here, it's just math. 

The capsule is not quite accelerating at 1g. There is some air resistance. But not a lot of air resistance at its low initial speed. Also the sensors are really lossy right now and a lot of this is being estimated from a distance, using the mathematical models that they managed to cobble together in time. 

They're going to be falling fast enough that by the time they are in range, the tolerances are...not going to be very big. But their magic user has already demonstrated her magically-enhanced reflexes, so there is that. 

They fall. 

(Carissa's earbud crackles to life. "Stand by for Feather Fall." The voice is distorted and strange in her ear.) 

A second - 

- two seconds - 

"NOW!" 

She was also eyeballing it in case they failed to tell her or told her something obviously stupid. Cheliax like all responsible training programs has their wizards practice Feather Falling some rabbits or dogs or whatever until you get good at the timing and stop leaving splattered animal on the ground. 

Feather Fall is one of the quickest spells. It has to be to be useful at all, really; most falls aren't from this height.

Feather Fall.

"Now doing a Summon Monster, air elemental, and also I'll try to fly over to the cockpit and see if I can push on it any." Ideally it wouldn't be moving away from her at nearly her Fly speed, that's going to suck for the peasants when it lands.

It's going to be slowing down! Just. Like. Not actually that much, not in the 36 seconds they have. 

".....Acknowledged," the person says in her ear, after a delay of like five seconds, and it's sort of audible in his voice that he is at the very least in a lot of pain. "Please proceed." 

(The actual seats available for the pilot and copilot are...better...than the makeshift padding. More than enough to prevent lethal injuries at an equivalent "crash" speed of somewhere between 20 and 25 m/s and only in the vertical plane, but they're also, like. Not really designed for crashes only in the vertical plane.) 

He's got to be seconds from death because what kind of supposed professional sounds like they're in pain otherwise? That's just advertising your weakness. 

Does Summon Monster get her anything?

The spell seems to work! 

It doesn't feel the way that it normally would. It gets her...something. 

 Not what she's used to getting; this isn't a summoned air elemental pulled out of the Elemental Plane of Air, it's a lot more like...the construct is there and the mind didn't show up to pilot it? 

Normally that's a worse spell - she has to pay direct attention to it - but in this specific case it's basically fine because all she's doing with it is blanketing the capsule and trying to make it stop moving except for its relentlessly gentle descent. 

Cease your forward momentum, big falling metal box. It's slow enough now she can at least keep pace with it and get in front of it and push it, which feels somewhat stupid but in principle ought to help. 

...did she get the timing right? It should be obvious now, with twelve seconds to go, whether the spell is going to run out first or land them first.

Very close to right! Maybe a second or two too early, it looks like. (This is perhaps mostly on Exception Handling, who have sensor data and computer simulations, and made the decision on when to tell Carissa to cast Feather Fall.) 

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. 

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

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. 

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. 

There is DATA on her SCREENS and aaaaaaaaaaaaah Merrin needs someone to recalibrate her alarm settings right flaming now because there are like six people with O2 sats under 60%, including that one guy over there who sort of superficially looks fine, and 20+ people under 85%. They can put it back to higher sensitivity once she has FIXED some of the GLARING PROBLEMS and will benefit from being alerted of NEW SURPRISING PROBLEMS. 

(This is subvocalized to her Exception Handling personal admin over the radio link, not yelled out loud, the injured bystanders running around being helpful don't need to worry about it at this point.) 

All right. Oxygen masks and portable bottles that will last twenty minutes each, here, go, the casualties are numbered off and locations displayed on her main foldout screen, get the flashing red ones first. (The helicopter en route has a big oxygen concentrator, but even the "portable field" kits are not really portable when your entry method is plummeting out of the sky and you already have 100kg of other medical gear.) 

- blood pressure monitoring, she does not in fact have enough non-invasive BP cuff kits for everyone, they're lightweight but it adds up. She has 15 of them (and 10 invasive kits but even she can't place one of those in less than two minutes). Anyone with a heart rate over 140 gets priority, that's those 13 people, then they're paired up thisaways with hopefully-more-stable casualties to rotate around. It's terrible for infection risk but she is eating a lot of "terrible for infection risk" here and that's ignoring the HORRIFYING SHIRT MEDICINE performed before her arrival. 

...Carissa is ablebodied. 

"Can you multitask the cold spell thing while running around?" Merrin snaps to her. "Have tasks need delegating." 

"The spell has ten feet of range."

She doesn't seem to mind being snapped at - it's not really relevant to whether she survives this - but she doesn't answer the way a dath ilani would, either; in her culture you don't just say 'no' to a superior.

This is slightly weirdly indirect and Merrin is momentarily irritated that she has to stop and parse it rather than just knowing, but - it's not this poor woman's fault that she ended up here unexpectedly from another world and has no idea how anything works in dath ilan. Merrin would die of social anxiety. 

Awww, so she can't make one of the few totally uninjured people run up and down delivering additional medical supplies to her recruited volunteers. 

"Okay." She glares at her layout-screen with the varyingly colored and flashing dots marking the location and condition of the casualties. "- I'm assigning you to hang out in the cockpit area, then, that's where the worst-injured people are."

Fewer of them than before, though, and headless bodies have been unceremoniously sort of shoved to one side; there's more floorspace than there was, though Merrin could really wish she'd had weight capacity for some absorbent towels so she doesn't have to do everything squatting in a slippery layer of blood everywhere. It just feels incredibly unsanitary to her hospital instincts. 

"Take these with you," she says, handing over a box with five precious 1L bags of IV fluids and a UV light hand-sterilizer. (20kg of her total weight capacity is dedicated to IV fluids). "Think there's someone on-site who can place IVs, not expecting you to learn it on the spot, but they'll need someone handing them things."

And Merrin is not going to be able to get to focus on any individual patient for at least five minutes, because she's busy Frantically Orienting To The Overall Situation; her eyes are currently on zoomed-in video footage of one of the patients, it's worse for visually assessing them but faster than running back and forth, and it would be awful if she slipped on a rock and fell on top of someone wearing over 150kg of power armor.

"...Put your hands in that box to sterilize them," she adds. "Whoever's on point in that section will show you how. ....Uhhhh." Magic user probably cannot carry a crate and a moderately heavy box alone? "Pink jacket!" She wishes people had NAMETAGS, she hates calling people by their clothing descriptions even if it's Standard In Emergencies. "Carry the box while she carries the heads." 

On point for coordinating treatment in the very very very makeshift Complicated Patient Area is still the Keeper; she's the best person at rapidly taking in and processing multiple streams of input, even if she has very little specific medical background. She did not previously know how to place IVs but will be able to do it after watching one of the airline staff do it once. 

She nods to Carissa and makes a gesture to Pink Shirt for where she wants the box of supplies. 

"Set of the tubing and one of the bags of liquid and one of the little opaque bags for each patient," she tells Carissa. "And carry the UV light sterilizer around - that's the gray 2kg flattened-cube. Airline attendant two will tell you how to use it." 

Well, she doesn't know which one is airline attendant two, and she's going to lose the spell at some point if she tries to cast it repeatedly simultaneous with using the uvlightsterilizer and handing out random bendy objects to everyone -

- nope. This is a test, she will simply have to not lose the spell while she does those other things. Tests don't have to be fair.

(Airline attendant two is helpfully waving! She also has a large numeral on her uniform, but it is of course in Baseline script.)

The Keeper cannot in fact read Carissa's facial expressions (Carissa is much more practiced at concealing those than dath ilan accounts for), but she didn't miss the hesitation. She had modeled in advance, having observed the magic user concentrating on spells, that this might be close to the edge of her abilities, despite her clearly having a lot of experience of working under conditions of duress. It might also have been something she could do just fine! The markets were really unsure of that and giving odds not far from 50/50. 

They don't actually desperately need the spell at this point - the heads won't rewarm much in the next fifteen minutes, and Merrin has chemical cold packs - though fewer of them than would have been included under the original plan, because the original plan did not really include there being 20 people still in any condition to benefit from IV fluids or supplementary oxygen. And they really desperately need people with working arms and legs, even unskilled people, because most of the bystanders with "minor" injuries are nonetheless impaired at one of walking or carrying.

It's interesting that she didn't communicate it, whether explicitly or - actually, by literally any indirect verbal hinting, she seemed ready to just do the thing that was pretty clearly, in her own self-assessment, probably not going to work? That seems very relevant for working with her even during this emergency, and definitely for making sense of her as an unanticipated (helpful! but terrifying!) anomaly in the longer run. There are much higher-ranked Keepers - not to mention global experts in social modeling - are going to be watching the now high-fidelity footage coming from Merrin's drone camera, trying to figure out recommendations for working across what is predictably going to be a vast cultural gulf, and plausibly one of basic psychological architecture. Just because she looks human on a visual level doesn't mean that she is, or at least not the kind of human that dath ilan knows. 

"We have non-magical cooling available now," she says. "We may still need your spell later, but we don't need it active constantly for cooling the current heads." 

(Carissa acknowledges this with a slight dip of the head and drops the cooling to focus on handing out of unfamiliar mechanical objects. ...so it was a test testing whether she'd object? They seem to be acting competently and it's their peoples' lives on the line, she's not going to argue with them about her orders. Usually people who give you orders have one of a good reason or a way to hurt you, and they presently have both.)

There are seven patients in the cockpit area. Five are, like, literally imminently dying; two of them, the miscarriage woman and the guy who got emergency liver surgery with a red-hot dagger, are in pretty terrible shape but, on the scale of the next 5-10 minutes, at least slightly stabilized.

Their most critical patients: 

#1: young guy with the horrifying chest injury, who is SOMEHOW STILL ALIVE and even still responding to painful stimuli. Which is honestly remarkable, if not miraculous, given an oxygen saturation of 45% breathing room mountainside 4000m-above-sea-level air, and a blood pressure of 60/30. His fortunately young and healthy heart is laboring incredibly hard for that, racing at 170 beats per minute; his breathing is ragged and shallow and like fifty breaths a minute. Every single physiological system is turned toward keeping his circulation going for just a few minutes longer, and he was physically fit enough to compensate really quite impressively well, but he's running out of slack. He desperately needs oxygen - really he needs invasive ventilation as soon as possible, but nobody except Merrin is certed to set that up - and IV fluids, and a blood-type-compatible transfusion as soon as possible. 

(They did not send Merrin down with transfusable blood. She has the blood type of all the passengers recorded, and a suggested protocol for who is least-injured and can afford to give up some blood, to cover the fifteen minutes before a much better-stocked medicopter reaches them.) 

#2: woman in her early 50s who lost a lot of blood from a half-severed femoral artery before Carissa got to her. She's actually not badly injured apart from that, her heart and lungs are fine, but she's unconscious, pale to the point of translucency, breathing labored. Her heart rate is up at like 190 now, which is not a rate that 50-year-olds are really supposed to hit, and her blood pressure is 75/40. Her measured oxygen saturation isn't disastrous, but she has a serious dearth of red blood cells and hemoglobin right now, so "85% saturated" is massively insufficient for her body's oxygen needs and the estimated equivalent is closer to 50% - but her brain is still getting circulation. Oxygen and IV fluids will help buy a few minutes for them to get, like, probably multiple people to contribute some blood. 

#3: seventeen-year-old boy with a head injury. They held off on immediate cryo because he still had a strong pulse and was breathing on his own, had reactive if sluggish pupils, and is slightly responsive to pain and not showing altered brainstem reflexes. Really what they need is a diagnostic scan, to determine whether to try medical management, messy field brain surgery, or go for cryo anyway. Irris is currently shaving his head to place the EEG electrodes, and Merrin will be sending someone over in like three minutes with their one ultrasound diagnostic scanner, once she's had time to teach a person who can both walk and use her hands - it happens to be the famous serial author - how to use it. His vital signs are, as predicted, mostly fine: heart rate 75, blood pressure 130/90, oxygen saturation 89%. 

#4: Man in his early 40s with slightly-less-catastrophic blunt trauma to his chest and abdomen (and a broken humerus and collarbone, neither of which matter.) He's clearly bleeding internally, probably including into the space between his lung membranes; his breathing has been getting more and more labored and his level of consciousness has been deteriorating rapidly. He still responds to auditory stimuli at all, but only with incoherent sounds. Heart rate 145, blood pressure 65/40, O2 saturation 76% and dropping. He's going to be in serious trouble on the scale of hours due to almost certainly having multiple small bowel perforations leaking gut bacteria into his abdominal cavity; if they couldn't rely on healing magic being available tomorrow, he would have very poor odds, but they might be able to hold off catastrophic sepsis for just long enough. 

#5. Woman in her 20s. Spinal injury, damage estimated at the T2 mid-thoracic vertebra given the symptoms observed. No sensation or motor function below the ribcage (which has some benefits, given that both of her legs are badly broken), and her diaphragm and chest wall muscles are significantly weakened; she's breathing on her own, but having a rough time of it, and coughing is basically not functioning, so she's not managing to clear her airway even of her own saliva. She's conscious, but very drowsy and confused, responding to questions with non-sequiturs or a slur of jumbled words. Heart rate 45 and blood pressure 55/25; a lot of that regulation is pretty borked. Oxygen saturation apparently 55%. She needs assisted ventilation, and probably vasopressors, and a scan to determine what else if anything is wrong because she can't super report pain to them. 

Their very critical imminently-dying patient #6 is not in the cockpit area! He's a man in his 30s who they thought mostly just had broken bones (though, like, REALLY A LOT of broken bones.) He's conscious if not very coherent, his breathing doesn't appear that worryingly labored, and his bleeding was fairly easily controlled before he lost that much blood. However. His oxygen saturation is at 52%, so clearly something is SERIOUSLY WRONG. He needs oxygen and a really urgent scan to try to determine exactly what is wrong, and probably urgently needs assisted ventilation. Other vital signs are less scary: heart rate 135, blood pressure 90/45. 

"Less critical" patients in the cockpit area: 

#1: internal injuries guy is actually not breathing very effectively! It was harder to tell because he's too out of it to complain of shortness of breath and his skin coloration is a bit darker, but the monitor doesn't lie: O2 saturation 57%. His heart rate is unsurprisingly up at 145, but blood pressure surprisingly adequate, clinging to 80/50. He clearly needs oxygen, probably assisted ventilation, and something to be done about the shirt-packed hole in him, but hopefully further emergency field surgery can wait until they have proper facilities including a sterile operating room.  

#2: miscarrying woman is semi-conscious and lost a ton of blood.  The worst hemorrhaging seems to actually be sort of under control now, but she's likely to need surgical intervention, once she's a little more stabilized. Heart rate of 165 - maybe partly from pain, because her blood pressure is holding up surprisingly well, at 85/45. Oxygen saturation 82%, but likely to rise once she has better perfusion including to her hopefully-undamaged lungs. 

Less critical patients not in the cockpit area and instead lying on cushions on the rocks outside: 

#3: Fourteen-year-old girl with a penetrating abdominal wound from flying metal. Carissa cauterized the worst of the bleeding, but she has intestines hanging out, and an anxious grandmother-gendertrope woman holding a rolled up jacket against the wound. She's deep in shock, conscious but her responses to questions don't really make sense. It's fortunate, in one way; the endorphins sloshing around her bloodstream mean that she's not, currently, screaming in agony. Her blood pressure was 72/30, heart rate 125, but she's a tiny girl for her age, that's at least a less scary blood pressure on her. O2 saturation 79%. She hopefully just needs supportive treatment until the helicopter with the mobile hospital facility arrives and someone can perform emergency surgery and a really thorough abdominal washout, but she could start deteriorating faster basically at any moment, and if Merrin has time it would be great to get her intubated and sedated so she's at least, like, prepped for surgery, and also definitely not going to confusedly move around and worsen the injuries any more. 

#4: Mid-40s man with...probably some kind of internal injuries? He's vomiting blood everywhere. Vital signs are, like, remarkably okay given that? Heart rate 115, blood pressure 95/60, initial O2 saturation 87%. He needs a diagnostic scan, and possibly Merrin can stop some of the bleeding via endoscopic procedure while they're waiting for the mobile hospital. How highly they prioritize his treatment will depend what they find on the scan, and whether his vital signs start to become less surprisingly okay. 

#5: Mid-20s young man who took a blunt-force injury to the chest and definitely has a pneumothorax - air in the pleural space between his lung membranes - and one lung mostly collapsed. It may or may not be about to become a much worse tension pneumothorax (where the air would be trapped and actually under positive pressure, resulting in not just a collapsed lung, but pressure on his remaining healthy lung and on his heart.) His initial O2 saturation was 59%, but his other basic vital signs were actually holding up pretty well, heart rate at 125, blood pressure at 88/40. He's responding well to supplementary oxygen, though, and able to communicate that, while breathing is very difficult right now, he is able to get some air and thinks he can manage for fifteen minutes until Merrin has the equipment for an emergency chest tube placement. If he deteriorates sooner than that - notably, if his blood pressure and heart rate get rapidly worse - they're going to assume a developing tension pneumothorax, and Merrin will detour to do a faster needle decompression and let the air out of his pleural space, pending the chest tube equipment being available. 

#6: Woman in her late 30s with a lumbar spinal injury and shattered pelvis. If not for the availability of HEALING MAGIC, she (and likely the young woman with the high thoracic spinal injury, though her medical advance directive is less firmly clear on this) would almost certainly be a candidate for early cryo. Though not right now, as a head in a crate; they would try to stabilize her enough for transport to an actual hospital facility, because even if the Future probably can still work with damaged brains, it's, like, better to do it under controlled conditions, and with "elective" cryopreservation, they can start infusing first stage cryoprotectants on a (heavily sedated) still-living patient. Anyway, Carissa stopped some serious but non-catastrophic bleeding before she could lose too much blood, and she's conscious and even vaguely oriented. Heart rate at 140 and blood pressure at 90/50, oxygen saturation actually up at 91% on room air; she took basically all of the force on her lower abdomen, not her lungs or heart. She's almost certainly bleeding internally and at pretty high risk of slipping further into shock, but it's going to be a complicated emergency surgery, not a 90-second procedure, and if at all possible they'll prefer to stretch her along with supportive treatments until the flying operating room arrives and they have a dozen highly trained emergency medtechs as opposed to one. 

#7: Man in his early 50s with multiple broken ribs - though, incredibly, no sign that any bone fragments pierced his lungs. His lungs definitely took some crushing force, he's coughing up pink foam, but his oxygen saturation was initially 71%. (It kind of says a lot about this situation that, to Merrin, this is a "slight sigh of relief" number; in a normal hospital setting it would be very much an aaaaaaaaah number.) His left arm was also more or less traumatically amputated by hitting a piece of torn and crumpled metal in the second impact. He lost a lot of blood even in the first seconds before Carissa showed up to shove a red-hot dagger up against torn gushing arteries. His heart rate is at 165, which is again not super safe for someone at his age but is better than 190, and his blood pressure is still only 85/50. He's conscious, though, if drowsy and not entirely oriented. He needs IV fluids and oxygen, and a blood transfusion but not quite as urgently as some of the other casualties do. If he manages to hang on without deteriorating any further until the full medicopter-hospital gets here, he'll be okay. Probably. 

That makes twelve. There were, initially, 32 patients with injuries triaged as life-threatening. Another nine of them are now cold heads in a crate. Ten are - not stable, by any means, but amateur first aid was enough that they're not thought to be especially at risk of deteriorating in the next 15 minutes. (12 minutes, now, until the first helicopter reaches them.) 

And one little girl is lying on a pile of cushions, blinking and rubbing her eyes and trying to figure out why she can't actually remember any of how she ended up down here on a mountainside; she just woke up, feeling kind of like she was in a doompunk-themed TV show that would be ill-advised for someone in her age group. It was going to be very exciting. There was a lady with ALTERNATEPHYSICS ECONOMICMAGIC POWERS who was going to try to save everyone, and she MISSED IT. 

Okay. 

She can do this. She's done sims that were - okay, not worse overall, but worse on some dimensions, like "having 100kg of carefully optimized field equipment on her" or "having backup incoming in twelve minutes." 

Merrin haaaaaaates triage. Especially when she cannot delegate anything more than the most basic of first aid, because her assistants are untrained laypeople most of whom have at least one broken bone. Her brain is screaming fifty affordances at her to DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW about basically all twelve of her most at-risk casualties, and she cannot do fifty things at once. She can't even do five things at once, once you add the constraint that they are on five different patients who are not physically in the same location and where she can only be in reach of one at a time - 

- and everyone is on a countdown timer right now, but one with its exact numbers obscured from her, reflected only in updating Diagnostic prediction markets, and WAY TOO MANY of the individual-patient markets have their 20% probability interval on imminent deteriorating and death without heroic treatment being in less than 12 minutes. And Merrin has to focus almost all of her efforts on, not even fixing anything, just - buying more time on those timers, at the cheapest exchange rate she can. 

(And it's okay if even she plus, at this point, tens of thousands of secrecy-cleared experts contributing to the markets, don't get everything exactly right. It's okay if they were always going to be too late. There's a box of heads being kept cool and they aren't going to lose anyone forever.) 

Updates on short-term patient stabilization: 

Patient #1 - the young man with the horrifying chest wall injuries - is, at least temporarily, responding super well to even the most basic of supportive treatment. A push of IV vasopressors (much more effective than the intramuscular shock-treatment drug blend; you can't actually administer real vasopressors by any route but IV, if you try to inject them into a muscle, it just pinches off all the nearby small blood vessels and cuts off local tissue circulation.) A liter of saline is now in a pressurized sleeve to shove it as fast as possible through the IV line in his arm, and he's breathing 100% oxygen through a facemask. Heart rate is still at 170, but his blood pressure is up to 90/60, his oxygen saturation is up to 77%, and he's actually back to conscious enough to squeeze his volunteer-unskilled-medtech's hand on request. 

Patient #2, the older woman with massive blood loss, is - not so much. IV fluids and vasopressors are bringing her blood pressure up a bit, but saline is only going to dilute her already-hemoglobin-depleted blood, and even an O2 saturation of 100% on supplemental oxygen isn't that meaningful; they're waiting for a capillary-stick blood gas reading, which is significantly worse than an arterial sample but nobody here except Merrin (and maybe the Keeper, if she's able to watch Merrin do it once) can safely stick a needle into an artery to draw blood. She's still deeply unconscious, her breathing irregular. 

Patient #3, the teenager with the head injury, has a pretty abnormal EEG and is now getting an ultrasound. His vital signs are fine, his oxygen saturation is 100% on not even that much supplementary oxygen, but his skull is at least cracked, if not in a way that deformed the bone, and it sure does look like there's bleeding in his skull. Probably an epidural hematoma, given the immediate unconsciousness and the fact that it's developed so rapidly. The location of the bleed is sort of lucky; it's near the occipital lobes, at the back of his head, nice and far from the prefrontal cortex and not, yet, putting pressure on the sections of his brain that maintain basic vital functions. He probably already has significant damage to his visual cortex, but not necessarily the brain regions that do global cognition and reasoning. 

Patient #4, blunt trauma to chest and abdomen, is responding at least modestly to supportive treatment. His blood pressure is up to 80/45, heart rate down to 135, oxygen saturation actually up to 89% when breathing 100% O2. His level of consciousness is not any better, though, and he's already vomited once since the accident and is now no longer in any shape to protect his airway against aspiration if he vomits again. The unskilled-bystander caring for him has him on his side in recovery position, but especially given that they're looking at major emergency surgery as soon as they have facilities for it, Merrin should probably prioritize intubating him pretty soon. 

Patient #5, young woman with the spinal injury, is responding well to fluids and vasopressors, including a drug to directly stimulate her heart to beat faster and harder, given that her nervous system is no longer capable of sending that message. Heart rate 70, blood pressure 90/45. She is correspondingly a little more alert; she's pretty disoriented but is at least trying to answer questions rather than saying something apparently random. Her oxygenation isn't improving as well as one might hope, though; she's working with massively impaired respiratory muscles, and she's exhausted. Even on 100% oxygen, her shallow uneven breathing only has her O2 saturation up to 78%. Invasive ventilation needed pretty urgently. 

Okay. 

She can do this. 

Merrin has now handed out all of the basic supplies and sensors. Everyone has monitoring. Everyone whose initial O2 saturation reading was below 80% now has an oxygen bottle. (She doesn't have enough on her for everyone; they are optimized hard for being lightweight and approximately indestructible, and still weigh 0.75kg each.) Every cluster of patients has an appointed Coordinator and she's handed out radio earbuds and throat microphones. The three airline staff who are trained in placing IVs and also at all mobile are going around and doing that for the less-immediately-critical patients; they don't have enough IV fluids for everyone but they still may want access for giving drugs. 

She picks up her pack - it's much lighter, now, it mostly still contains her direct-donor-to-recipient blood transfusion kits and her field surgical kit and the stuff for intubating people - and she picks up her unfolded portable-LCD-screen assembly by its base, and fortunately she is in POWER ARMOR so she can just carry 40kg of pack and a big unwieldy screen, one in each hand, without it bothering her even a little bit. 

She makes her way to the not-Complicated Patient Area. The floor is sloped. Ugh. And, like, definitely sort of buckled. Makes for a terrible work surface. At least it has the side benefit that the blood has mostly oozed down to pool at one side, and they can make that the Decapitated Bodies Side? 

Terrible how she shouldn't use her magic user, who might have a weird alternatephysics blood type, for blood transfusions even though she's one of the few totally uninjured people here

She sets up her screens so the base is at least not sitting in a pool of blood, magnetic-locks it to the flooring, and she taps her control console to select Major Blood Loss Woman and check who on the plane has a compatible blood type and only minor injuries.

She subvocalizes instructions to the comms staffperson, who has been her mobile-errand-assistant throughout the initial triage. Requests that a particular passenger be pulled off whatever unskilled-care-aide work they're currently doing and swap in here. 

- oh, there's the magic user, generally being a pair of hands for the Keeper why is Merrin having to delegate medical tasks to a FIRST-RANK KEEPER this should be BANNED, but not actually occupied right this second? 

Merrin digs out a pack of premixed injection syringes. "Hey. Can you administer painkillers to everyone in here? You can watch me do one but it's very straightforward. Cap goes off, like so - pick a big muscle, thigh probably best, not in the middle of an injury - tear open a sterilizing wipe and clean the skin - then just put the yellow marked end and press it firmly against the skin. Try not to stick yourself, it's not harmful to dath ilan humans but you're from another world and you might be allergic." 

(Someone has warned her that the magic user, while clearly both reasonably intelligent and probably experienced at some form of something at least adjacent to emergency Exception Handling work, is definitely not used to Baseline medical shorthand and is using ??conceptualmagic translation?? that they don't understand well, and so Merrin should try to communicate clearly and simply. Merrin is pretty good at doing this, since she can mostly fall back on "how she wants people to explain things to her when she's 20 hours into a sim.") 

"Pain...killers?" she repeats skeptically, but she is happy to press the not-magic-items against peoples' skin and it does not in fact look very complicated.

That sure was a reaction! Does her world...not have drugs that treat pain? Sounds horrific. Though maybe there would just be limited development pressure and financial incentives for pharmaceuticals research, if nobody stayed sick or injured very long because they have near-instantaneous magical healing??? 

"We don't have magical healing but we do have effective drugs, and untreated pain is a risk factor for shock," she explains, because it might be relevant and also she wasn't using her mouth for anything else that exact second. 

Time to UV-sterilize her inner gloves (the outer gloves are powered and let her grip and climb things; the inner ones are just protective, while basically not at all getting in the way of manual dexterity), and then carefully catheterize a nervous but cooperative fellow passenger's radial artery – you don't normally donate arterial blood, it's meaningfully riskier, but the field direct-donor-to-recipient blood transfusion kit doesn't come with a pump. Pumps weigh something, and need battery power, which also weighs something. So in this case, the donor's own blood pressure, plus positioning them for gravity to assist, will be doing that work. 

All her tubing is pre-primed with saline, which makes it good for only 12 hours, but cuts 10 seconds of work off every procedure. She unhooks the spent bag of saline, sterilizes the IV port, hooks up the donor tubing. Unclamps it. 

"I'll stop this once once you've donated 400 ml," she tells the woman, "unless you feel unwell first, so flag right away if you're dizzy, short of breath, any chest pain -"

She taps her screen controls to bring up the data from the flow sensor and sets a ten-second warning alarm and a more urgent STOP alarm, though of course lots of experts are watching from a distance and someone will tell her if she misses it.

Aaaaaaand then it's time to put a breathing tube in the guy with horrifying chest injuries! Because this will be faster than drilling a hole in the seventeen-year-old kid's skull as a temporary measure to drain some of the blood and reduce his intracranial pressure until it's safer to do full-on invasive neurosurgery. 

She doesn't want to give him full anesthesia for it, because he's barely maintaining his vital signs right now and sedation will tank his blood pressure and cut out his respiratory drive, and he might be difficult to intubate, and she can't afford for his oxygenation to drop further while she's struggling with it. 

She explains loudly and clearly what she's going to do, while she gives an IV injection of a mild sedative that will at least help him stay calm, and sprays the back of his throat to numb the area and temporarily block his gag reflex, and then has the Keeper and his volunteer-unskilled-care-aide position him for it. 

This terrified guy who definitely looks like he's dying is ABSURDLY cooperative about holding still while they for some reason shove a plastic tube as thick as Carissa's index finger down his throat! His eyes are watering as he desperately tries not to cough, and he's sort of crushing the Keeper's hand. 

It still looks pretty uncomfortable once Merrin is done! But she can get him gently propped against a wall against a cushion so his torso is elevated at an angle, and hand the unskilled volunteer a bag to squeeze as it fills with oxygen from the bottle, and his color is already improving. 

Merrin shows the Keeper and volunteer where the tiny screen on the portable O2 saturation reader is displayed. "Keep it above 90%." 

She starts getting out her surgical kit. The box has a wide array of very sharp-looking tools in it; they don't really look designed to be weapons, but it's unclear what they are for, if not literal torture implements. 

She moves over to the unconscious teenager and starts getting out the bone drill. ...She needs more than one person whose hands she can borrow. The Keeper should probably hand her surgical tools and have charge of the field suction unit, since she, you know, actually speaks Baseline without a weird poorly understood conceptualmagic translation. 

"Magic user, can you hold the light and my portable ultrasound." It's a smaller model than the one that the serial author - who is also the woman with birds on her face - is currently carrying around getting diagnostic scans on everyone flagged for that. "I'll just - this end goes against the skin like so, I want the image to be showing this area -" she pulls up a still shot of the previous ultrasound, "- if you're stuck I'll tell you to move it left or right or up or down. Can you do that." 

Can she hold things? Is it a trick question? "...yes? If you want me to hold them with a Mage Hand and administer pain-killers at the same time I need to stay within fifty feet."

The cockpit area is substantially less than fifty feet across. "- Let's try it like that and see if you can control it well enough. I don't need it for long, and I only need giving painkillers to the patients in this area." 

The device is, in fact, super easy to use; it's meant to be something that a field medtech can hand off to an unskilled bystander if they need both hands for something else. Carissa can get it into position with Mage Hand and then occasionally adjust it per Merrin's requests. 

Merrin sterilizes a patch of scalp and opens an incision and flap in the skin and then drills a burr hole in the kid's skull. "Suction. Ultrasound left and down. Good." 

It's not great. Whatever's torn in there is still bleeding. Merrin gets the half-clotted blood out with some determined suction and sticks a (sterile) sensor in there because why not, but she can't just sit there with their single field suction unit in use on this patient, she needs it for other people. 

She places and secure a generic drainage tube instead with a compressible bulb suction thingy on the end; she'll have to position the patient so it can keep just sort of draining out before it clots. But he hasn't lost much blood up to this point, and it's really not long now until help arrives. 

She does give the unskilled-care-aide assigned to the kid a pop-and-fold-out clear plastic container to empty the compressible bulb into when it fills, so they can at least measure his total blood loss. 

Moving on? 

Patient #5 with the spinal injury is not breathing effectively right now and needs invasive ventilation as soon as possible. Patient #2 with the massive blood loss is still unconscious and should really be intubated for airway protection. Patient #4, blunt trauma, is definitely super not protecting his airway, also needs to be intubated. Patient #3 with the head injury really should also be intubated for airway protection, given the "unconscious", but he's actually less concerning in the immediate term, his breathing is deeper and steadier now that his intracranial pressure is being relieved, and his vital signs are still fine.  

However, the Keeper has now seen Merrin do this once and can do everyone else in the cockpit area? 

(Keepers are really scary sometimes.) Yes, that would be amazing, there are other patients who are not physically located here and are way too unstable to move, and Merrin feels very aaaaaaaaaaah about not attending to them yet. 

Critical patient #8 is not here, he's inconveniently far away, but his oxygenation didn't really improve much with supportive treatment. A medically-untrained attempt at a scan did not entirely clarify things. Diagnostic Planning wants to know if Merrin can attempt a ventilation-perfusion contrast scan, his lungs look structurally okay on the low-resolution field ultrasound unit but something is clearly very badly wrong and he might have an embolism. He is, remarkably, still conscious with an O2 saturation of 73% while breathing 100% oxygen, but he super needs assistive ventilation, and for Merrin to try to keep him alive if not stable until the second medicopter arrives with better scanning and interventional radiology suites. 

High-risk patient #5, the young man with the suspected pneumothorax, is also deteriorating. Unclear if it's a tension pneumothorax or if he's also bleeding into the pericardial space around his heart, but his blood pressure is tanking fast and didn't respond basically at all to IV fluids. 

Merrin should probably charge off and deal with...one of...those things??? 

Is Treatment Planning in agreement that she can try a needle decompression on the pneumothorax guy, with the premise that it will take her literally fifteen seconds and might stabilize him enough that she can afford to be distracted for more like three entire minutes attempting a ventilation-perfusion scan? 

(There are about six minutes to go until the first helicopter arrives, at which point Merrin will at least not be the only trained medtech on the scene, though the small-regional-hospital team is not really certed up to Exception Handling standards.) 

Scan isn't the highest next-minute priority. She should try the needle decompression and get both patients on assisted ventilation and then try it, if nothing else changes in the vicinity before that. 

The Keeper would like Carissa to pass things to her and help hold patients for intubation (either awake or with sedation, depending on how unstable they are) with Mage Hand again. 

She gives instructions calmly, maybe making a deliberate effort to use phrasings that don't assume one is familiar with the denser Baseline compound-words for emergency coordination usage.

(Carissa will maybe have noticed that there's some sort of interesting dynamic in the interactions between Merrin and the Keeper, where it's - almost that they're both deferent to the other, along different dimensions? Merrin does not conceal emotional reactions nearly to Chelish standards, and was visibly and audibly - not nervous, exactly, but self-conscious, put on the spot, like someone unexpectedly running into a high-ranking noble. The older woman, on the other hand, is just - paying incredibly close attention to exactly what Merrin says to do, including in a way where she seems to be modeling and anticipating requests for surgical instruments and such in advance, and then doing it efficiently and perfectly, sometimes even before Merrin actually asked. 

She did also just watch someone who clearly seems like a very highly trained adventurer do a bizarre and complicated procedure once, clarified that she is now adequately familiarized with it, and is now executing it herself apparently without difficulty, though she goes more slowly.) 

Her going guess is that it's something like a nonmagical headband for perfect memory, though all her guesses are probably entirely wrong because who even knows what high level adventuring looks like without magic.

She can pass items with Mage Hand but she can't restrain people with it, it doesn't exert enough force for that. She'll have to come back over to where the Keeper is and stand on their forearms again.

This is not exactly a standard medtech method for restraining people and it's odd that this woman apparently has so much practice with it but it's certainly effective. 

(The Keeper is not nearly as comfortable with this procedure as Merrin would be. She knows how to tell if things are going right, and Merrin thinks out loud when she's working and did flag "do not put the tube down the esophagus", but it's not that hard to avoid doing that by accident, there's a camera on the end of the scope for it. There are, of course, predictably a huge space of unknown-unknowns-to her Things That Could Go Wrong, and so her backup plan for if things do not appear to be going right is to abort the procedure - none of these patients are about to stop breathing, and they're doing it with minimal sedation - and flag to Merrin that she needs to swing back here.) 

This is taking a lot of concentration and she's not especially modeling Carissa in any more detail than "how to communicate effectively with the alien, given the information they at this point have", which should hopefully be better soon, now that they have actual camera footage on the scene and people in control rooms all over the planet paying attention to it. 

Elsewhere, someone is in fact watching with rather a lot of interest. 

(Khemeth did spare some attention for Merrin, at the start, because these are not optimal Merrin work conditions. Merrin seems to be performing entirely adequately, though, albeit in the sort of weird neurodivergent Merrin headspace where it's actually kind of difficult for Khemeth to model her emotional responses to things.) 

The alien alternatephysics magic user is also far more important than whether Merrin is working at 5% lower efficiency than she would usually. 

The first thing: it's hard to read her emotional reactions. She's very controlled, in a way that most dath ilanis don't even attempt, let alone succeed at. If she's feeling upset about the deeply upsetting situation all around her - if she felt anything about a man bleeding out in front of her after Irris tried and failed a last-ditch improvised surgery to save him - it doesn't show. 

She's not even sparing worried glances for the kids. (None of whom are critically injured, anymore, but crying bleeding children are still pretty upsetting for most dath ilanis.) 

She's pretty competent at restraining people, if perhaps not in a way optimized to avoid injuring them; Merrin would do it as effectively and more gently. Her way works, but sure does not look like something learned in a medical context (and doesn't really look like something learned in an infohazardous sex life context either.) This too doesn't seem to bother her at all. 

- she's scared. Not just nervous, not just in a confusing stressful situation of uncertainty, but scared. That does show, though she's clearly going to a lot of effort to conceal it, and most dath ilanis who are not Khemeth wouldn't pick up on it. She's scared in a visceral way – of something happening to her, not of deaths happening around her. 

She certainly seems to have some kind of training for emergency situations, though, because despite being clearly terrified of something, she's externally calm and focused. She has excellent situational awareness, perhaps in some ways better than Merrin's. For the most part she follows instructions immediately and unhesitatingly, despite the conceptual and cultural gulf clearly left uncrossed by her translation magic. He suspects that she's paying quite a lot of attention to this, both to executing instructions correctly and to - something else, some other social goal. It's taking some poking to figure it out. She's...deferent, obedient, but not in a way that quite rings as familiar.

It's maybe closer to Merrin's social anxiety than to the average dath ilani following emergency orders. There's a hint of evading a threat, that wouldn't make sense in context unless it's the people she feels threatened by, and the threat is, what, upsetting people? saying thoughtless things that hurt people's feelings? - but it's not the same as that, it's skew in some other direction. 

She's paying a lot of attention to the people around her. Particularly Merrin, when she arrived, and the Keeper. She was closely watching how everyone else reacted to Merrin's arrival; she's also doing this to some extent with the Keeper. She was clearly trying to read something into it, something that felt was very important to her - to her, on a visceral level, not just to the prognosis of all the injured and dying around her. Maybe to something as basic and fundamental as food or shelter or physical safety. He would guess that she's unusually low-empathy - not zero empathy, he heard descriptions of some of her earlier reactions including directly from Irris, and transmitted voice recordings are better than nothing for analysis.

She offered immediately to try to save people. When she made the request that they – try to contact an extradimensional entity called Asmodeus? they really need a followup conversation on that as soon as things. stop. happening. so. fast. – several people including the Keeper on board thought that there was some sort of strong emotion there. That, faced with nearly a hundred doomed strangers on an alien world, she was motivated to save them well before she had any way of knowing how much she would be paid for it. 

(The Keeper also suspects that she has some sort of specific cognitive-skills training, in addition to her obvious degree of experience in Something Which Isn't Exception Handling. Sometimes she closes her eyes, appears to concentrate, and then is simultaneously more relaxed and more determined.) 

The fear is pretty distracting! His mental model of her doesn't have enough moving parts, yet, to entirely pin it down, so it's just THERE and LOUD. This is one of the downsides of Khemeth's method of getting inside people's heads, as compared to the training that Keepers have. 

....So what does this, set alongside other snippets they've heard, imply about the world she came from? 

She comes from a world where there are non-cryopreservation alternatives to True Death, and - the sorts of entities it would even conceptually make sense to try to contact-or-something from another world for help - and a pretty wide range of economicmagic and conceptualmagic, though they don't have enough of a grasp of what alternatephysics underlies her 'spells' to guess at which other spells exist. 

She's obviously fairly intelligent - actually a bit higher than dath ilan median on raw thinkoomph, he would venture - but seems confused at a number of Baseline constructions. She has a ??doompunk?? healing spell. The Keeper thought she had some sort of reaction to the offer of payment, one that wasn't just "I have no idea how your world's currency works." 

Suppose he runs with the maybe-wrong assumption that her fear level is based on how her world works, and learned priors from that, not just her uncertainty about dath ilan. Taken at face value, that implies she comes from a dangerous world. (Or has contact with another society that's dangerous, or knows a group that's dangerous, or maybe had heard of other worlds and that they were dangerous...) But somewhere her flavor of vigilance would be adaptive, or at least a predictable prior for someone to form even if it didn't necessarily help them survive, so - dangerous socially, but to the point that she's worried about physical safety. Which implies a world where a breakdown of Coordination to the point of interpersonal violence is - not even just an occasional rare disaster, but something that could happen unforewarned, something you need to maintain situational awareness for to the same degree that Merrin maintains situational awareness of patient vital signs. 

(Of course, maybe it's not that at all. He can try to flag hypotheses and then guess at probability weightings, though in the moment he's mostly generating impressions as fast as he can, tossing numbers at them, and passing them on to the larger team working on this.) 

- this is not really enough to go on to sketch even much of an outline of her world of origin (or whatever other factor here is relevant to how dath ilan will end up interacting with her), let alone to shape a plan for what to do about it, which is not really Khemeth's comparative advantage anyway. But Khemeth is documenting everything he observes, whether or not even he thinks it's relevant, and he isn't the only one doing the observing. 

Elsewhere, quite a large number of people are poring over extremely long lists of potential premises or facts about the magic user's world of origin, and trying to pare it down, noting which ones have probability mass squeezed away toward other premises once you update from their actual observations. 

(Different groups are working with different sets of said observations, or hearing them in a different order, to see if that results in different insights. Half of the Keepers are entirely causally screened from the situation, in case the other half get taken out by some kind of cognitohazard. They're being careful, while still trying to squeeze every bit of information they can out of simple observation, because not only can they not spare any time for questioning the new arrival until the immediate emergency is dealt with, it might matter a lot how they approach that conversation.) 

On the ground: 

Minutes pass. Nobody else dies.

The patient with the mystery lung problem is pretty close; even intubated and with assisted ventilation and 100% oxygen, his O2 saturation is in the 60s. There's indeed some sort of horrible ventilation-perfusion mismatch going on, almost certainly a pulmonary embolism of some kind. Given the number of long bone fractures, it could be a fat embolism – an unwanted glob of bone marrow, or maybe a lot of them given how there isn't a clear focal affected area, blocking off the arterial circulation to swaths of his lungs. Either way he's going to need extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as soon as possible. If there's bone marrow fat floating around in this patient's bloodstream - which they can check for sure with a more thorough suite of lab testing once the Exception Handling medicopter lands - then his brain is at risk as well, and they'll want to place a venous filter to try to prevent anything from his venous systemic circulation making it all the way through his heart and lungs and onward to his brain. 

The patient with the pneumothorax is in fact breathing better after Merrin releases the air from his pleural cavity. His heart rate is still climbing, now at 160, and his blood pressure is dropping, so there's probably a cardiac problem as well. The field ultrasound unit isn't great for doing procedures near the heart, and with vasopressors he's maintaining at least enough of a blood pressure to stay conscious. 

Vomiting-blood patient gets a breathing tube placed, because he's now out of it enough to be at risk of aspirating. The patient with the chest injury gets a blood transfusion, which should help his body transport some of the oxygen now being forced into his lungs. (He's still basically conscious, if groggy on painkillers and mild sedation; he's not very happy about this state of affairs, but with the limited degree of monitoring they have in this context, it's useful if any sudden neurological deterioration is obvious.) 

Nobody else deteriorates significantly. 

And then another flying machine comes screaming down out of the sky! 

It's not moving as fast as the plane was, and it has a very different design, with spinning rotors instead of rigid wings to generate lift. It has the advantage that it can apparently descend in a straight vertical line, touching down on a relatively flat area thirty meters away from the cockpit. 

A dozen medtechs spill out, uniformed and carrying equipment but definitely not wearing powered armor. They sprint towards the scene. 

She goes very still, and watches them carefully. Does this batch of people include ones whose job is plausibly Wizard Handling.

This helicopter was dispatched before they knew there was a wizard on the plane! Nobody on board has any particularly relevant training or experience for wizard handling! They're small town emergency medtechs who are at least basically certed for emergency cryo and on-site first aid! 

The team coordinator has been talking to someone from Exception Handling for the last thirty-five minutes, though, and is as ready as she's going to get to be the Short Term Alien Magic User Liaison! Given that no one on the second medicopter is super specced for this either, it seems better to keep her on until the arrival of the next Exception Handling team, one of specialists in things other than the medical, who have more of the equipment needed to set up a temporary hospital and base here in the wilderness.

(Inconveniently, Merrin is one of the people who has kind of a surprising degree of training in alien first contact scenarios, mostly just because Exception Handling sim writers sometimes get bored and "surprise: aliens!" is always a fun twist. Merrin is also way too busy to be on alien magic user liaison duty right now.) 

A woman in her mid-30s jogs up to the cockpit area, dodging rocks and casualties, and swings off her pack, which she offers to the Keeper. 

And then turns to look at Carissa. "My name is Farris. I don't think there was time before this for anyone to introduce themselves?" 

Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh the first faction of Carissa-handlers are here to decide if they gain if she lives   if she acts like an idiot then she deserves to die here in this horrible horrible place with no afterlives. 

Probably if they don't have magic then they can't do anything with her name but that doesn't mean it's not stupid, giving out your name in contexts where you don't know anything about the local rules. And it's possible that the reason no one introduced themselves beforehand was not that they've been very busy but that there are things that can be done with names, here. And it's possible that they'll make inferences about her from hearing Taldane spoken, though she did already speak the Taldane for Asmodeus's name. ...it's possible that if they confirm she speaks Taldane they'll be able to further infer which god she was speaking about, there. 

"You can call me Maartje," she says, after a half-second's hesitation. 

That's not her name. 80% confidence. 

(90% confidence is what Khemeth usually puts when something feels definitely absolutely right and also his sense of it is entirely opaque social intuition and he has no external confirmation to point at, because in those situations he's right about nine times in ten. He's downgrading it here because 'Maartje' is an alien.) 

Also, that question seemed - fraught, for her? Khemeth isn't sure quite what to read into that fractional pause, whatever he noticed in her careful lack of change in her expression, but it's something significant. And she's still scared. 

(Farris does not need to hear any of those observations in real time. She was already briefed that the magic user from another world is likely to be pretty tense - it's an overwhelming situation to be in regardless of specifics - and, while she clearly has some sort of Unspecified Training not entirely dissimilar to, say, Merrin's, and is unlikely to be incapacitatingly upset, she might be shaken. It was that sort of situation.) 

"We're unlikely to need anything urgent from you until the point when you can do more of the healing magic," she says. "Just to fill you in on the plan, it sounds like we're going to set up a field hospital on the site," and an alien/anomaly quarantine zone, "rather than move and evacuate all the patients. If you aren't tired, you could help carry heavy things and set up tents once that arrives - this isn't a specialized-high-value-use-of-your-expertise-and-training*, but may still be your comparative advantage, we have a shortage of able-bodied people and particularly able-bodied people who are not fully occupied with medical treatments. I'm certain that we will think of uses for the flexible-use spell that does heating and cooling and other things, and probably the light one and the manipulating-forces-from-a-distance one, but they're unlikely to be life-critical uses. And I'm aware that we never had a chance to ask what you were doing before this." And she heard a report that the woman arrived looking out of breath and like she had just been doing something high-exertion. "If you are tired and would benefit from rest, that would be relatively less disruptive now." 

*A three syllable word. 

Well. That's all very coherent and civilized and everything she says is information to people she knows nothing about but she also cannot afford for them to think she's going to be uncooperative. "What is your assessment of the security status of this location." Good language, it's fun to use in its clipped fast way if she's trying to say something she actually wants to say that way. 

...Interesting. That adds quite a few bits of update to the hypothesis that she's worried about threats to her safety. From what, though? 

Well. She is in a world that knows nothing about her world, and in fact until recently would have with high confidence said that her world didn't and couldn't exist, not in a way where it would interact with this part of Greater Reality. But they were apparently wrong about that! And, perhaps more to the point, not-Maartje cannot actually confidently know that dath ilan had before now heard nothing about her world, wherever and whatever it is.

Not-Maartje...knows really very little about dath ilan in general, actually? She is presumably bringing her own prior into this situation, but Khemeth doesn't know what they are. She wouldn't come into this knowing anything about how dath ilan, specifically, runs Governance. Maybe her world has a strength-based dictatorship or a Unilateral Dictator; maybe it has one of a dozen things that Khemeth hasn't thought of yet. 

What has she actually observed? A crashing plane, and she doesn't know how much of an absurdly unlikely fluke that was. A reasonably organized if rather scrambled-improvisational response to it. Merrin's mother, who is certainly...a person...to be the first dath ilani anyone meets face to face, though it wasn't a long conversation by the sound of things. One of the top specialist Exception Handling endurance medtechs trained in Weird Situations, of which this is certainly one, airdropping out of the sky (which she was surprisingly underawed by, at least for the two seconds it took for Khemeth to remember that of course it wouldn't be impressive to her, she has a flying spell.) Some messy acts of desperate field surgery, which is, you know, not exactly showcasing dath ilan's medical competence at its best. A helicopter of small town medtechs, now arriving. 

If she can't read the numbers on Merrin's screens, the rapidly-updating prediction markets with liquidity usually associated with top global corporations, then she has very little indication of the scale and coordination of the worldwide response happening out of her sight. More to the point, she doesn't know the content of that response. Doesn't know if dath ilan intends to treat her as a hostile alien, regardless of how many people's True Lives she just saved. 

(And, well, they do in fact have an armed nuclear weapon pointed at her location. Just in case. It's probably not the response they need, but dath ilan, too, is operating in an information vacuum, making the best contingency-plans they can while the probability spread over possible future contingencies is scarcely narrowed down at all...) 

- that feels right. Not-Maartje is trying to do that, in her head, assessing all the new arrivals, everyone interacting with her, trying to figure out their goals and incentives and resources, and she does not by default assume that the answer to those questions is one that bodes well for her. If all the steps in what is really quite a long and unjustifiedly specific chain of hypotheses on his part are correct, she's plausibly worried about straight-up interpersonal violence. 

(Which has a "feels right" ring to it, but Khemeth is only going to put 60% on it, since it's running on quite a lot of assumptions.) 

That's...well, for one it's pretty upsetting, actually! Now Khemeth is trying on a more specific mental model of not-Maartje's fear, and it's unpleasant! It also gives him a doomy feeling about her world. Though of course it could be nothing to do with her world, and just in response to the sudden looming uncertainty of an impossible even having nonetheless happened. Dath ilan too is hoping for cooperation here and fully intending to try for it, and also readying other contingency-plans. 

(The Exception Handling staffperson gave Farris some scripts in her onboarding, and she's now getting an updated prompt via earbud.) 

"This was a catastrophic event even before you arrived," she says. "In expectation a lot more catastrophic. There was already a lot of secrecy-cleared worldwide attention on it. And - learning about another alternatephysics world, with economicmagic and conceptualmagic that works here, is - this is probably one of the most important things that could possibly happen. Getting resources and personnel physically to the site is slower; this is a remote area, that's why our team was the first aside from Merrin, and we were en route for almost forty-five minutes from the nearest city big enough to have a hospital. But the area is modeled as geologically stable, less than 1 in 20 odds on a landslide or other dangerous geological event, and Exception Handling will be here to secure the site further in maybe an hour. I could wish we had more medtechs and an entire hospital installation, but - I'm not worried about something going wrong that causes more injuries than the current ones, or anything." 

That has to be deliberately unhelpful, there's no way someone could be that unhelpful accidentally. Obviously when a person with world-altering magical powers shows up and people everywhere know about it the risk is not rockslides causing further injuries.

But she did go out of her way to say that the event attracted 'worldwide attention'. Perhaps that's as much indication as she's permitted to give that there are absolutely other factions at play, that 'we're remaining at this location' is meant to last only until someone comes by to change that - but why would she be permitted to give that much indication, why not reassure Carissa that very few people know the plane didn't crash with all aboard? Which would be threatening in its own way -- it'd be an obvious implication that the can make the plane have crashed with all aboard, if they need to. 

- that's it, probably. There's worldwide attention, which is to say, we couldn't get rid of you easily; everyone who acts will be acting in a fashion fairly transparent to everyone else.

Maaaybe they're putting together a sort of Worldwound treaty but it seems like too much to count on.  

"Exception Handling?" she says politely.

Okay, WHAT is she reading into that attempt at reassurance - it's not in fact the reassurance Khemeth would have given, but he's not on-scene and in fact absolutely should not go stick himself into the middle of the quarantine zone.

It's deeply frustrating how controlled not-Maartje's micro-expressions and body language are. He can definitely tell that she's having a reaction that she is trying to control, but she's good at that control, and given the complete absence of any other background information to piece together hypotheses at what she might be thinking, what he can read is really low fidelity.

She's...frustrated, maybe? Wanting some specific information, and that wasn't it? 

She has that explanation ready to go! It's a pretty reasonable and obvious question for an alien to have. 

"Exception Handling is the branch of Governance* that handles anomalies outside of what the ordinary regulations and hierarchy of management are designed to handle well. Like, well, planes crashing in the first place, and especially like your arrival. Exception Handling did a lot of the plan-proposals and workshopped the one we ended up using. The planet you're on is called by its inhabitants dath ilan; decisions about you will be ultimately routed to a Chief Executive, who is appointed by {chosen by people}^4** where the base level is the general population of the planet, 97% of whom over puberty participate in choosing."

Pause. 

"...Merrin, the one who airdropped in and was first on the scene, works for Exception Handling, and so do the next cohort of medtechs arriving." 

*Tongues helpfully provides some Connotations, including a very strong sense that Governance is a proper noun referring by definition to the single relevant government body. 

**This is a sentence construction that indicates four levels of recursion on elected groups going on to elect higher levels of representatives, in only a few syllables. 

Officially, this world or at least the parts of it you are allowed to see are united beneath one Chief Executive. Got it. 

Officially, the Chief Executive is chosen by the people. Got it. 

Exception Handling is the body of the government that carries out the Chief's (she mentally drops the 'executive', it's too long) orders in unusual situations, such as a bunch of important nobles being on a crashing airship (crashing by accident? probably not) and such as a person from another world showing up. Got it. 

Exception Handling is incoming -- they don't have Teleport, so presumably on more airships, but the Chief wouldn't have any reason to want his own peoples' airships to crash so they'll probably get here fine. "What's the Chief Executive's name, and how are they referred-to-by-office? It's Exception Handling that decided we would remain at this location rather than boarding further airships?" Makes sense, if the Chief didn't intend that this one crash and hasn't yet figured out why it did. "Has the Chief Executive indicated the position of Governance regarding persons from other worlds?"

She answers the middle question first because it's easiest. "Yes. This is in-scope for Exception Handling. I don't know if they had a specifically relevant and rehearsed contingency plan, they have a lot of those but this is very specific." 

Pause. 

"Welthorm [followed by a 10-digit number], 'Chief Executive of Civilization' or maybe I didn't understand the question. And - I haven't been told about any policies customized to you, because we don't know much about you, I expect Exception Handling is working on something based on the most similar prepared contingency and will do more of that once we have a chance to learn more about your world. I imagine - uh, personally imagine but-can't-commit-to that, I'm not a Very Serious Person and there will really soon, less-than-five-minutes, be someone with more direct comms to Very Serious people, and twenty or thirty minutes after that there'll be someone from Exception Handling on-site who can answer more of your questions. But I imagine the basic theory is to buy everything you know - for really quite a lot of labor-hours, I don't know if it's more than saving almost 100 True Lives but it could be - and then see if we can figure out how to reach other worlds that are safe to trade with and trade with them?"

Another pause, because she's listening to a prompt from the Exception Handling admin via her earbud. "- Clarification on how many minutes of translation conceptualmagic you have left, and that your other conceptualmagics for it won't let you speak only understand?" 

Those are vaguely sensible questions, though Khemeth isn't sure what she expected the answer to "referred-to-by-office?" would be, if not "Chief Executive". He is mentally toying around with several different possible sets of unjustified assumptions to see what that gets him, marking them mentally (and explicitly in his notes) as incredibly tentative and probably wrong. 

How Lawful Neutral of them. If it's real, it could be a lot worse. 

(They've had HOW many of this dynasty? That has to be an exaggeration, right??)

"I have twenty minutes remaining of Tongues, and then another sixty minutes of Comprehend Languages. After that I won't have magic until morning, and -

- I don't know enough about your civilization to know if I want to teach you my magic. There isn't much I'd need another two hundred million laborer-hours for, and the things I might want are sensitive and I'd need substantially more assurance of your Lawfulness to even propose negotiations regarding them." Deep breath." "I am reluctant to prepare spells in the expectation my activities will be observed and used to attempt to infer magic, so I do not have a strong expectation I will have spells tomorrow or in the foreseeable future."

(She almost certainly can't actually stick to it. Without the ability to understand what's going on something bad would definitely happen very quickly. But, if you're in a position of safety from immediate death, you try a little bit of defiance, to see how they take it. If they're really Lawful Neutral, or intent to keep pretending so, they have to play along, here. If they don't -

- better to know.)

Khemeth cannot say this was high among his predictions of what not-Maartje was going to say next! Though they did have some other contingencies that involved 'the magic user no longer gets any more magic after today', and this is after all why they are having this conversation before the translation conceptualmagic runs out, even if that means a medtech who is not doing medicine while there is really quite a lot of medicine that needs doing. They can flip the conversation onto a new branch of the possible-conversations protocol sketched out over the last forty minutes. 

...It's interesting. It - sort of makes him like her more? It's not exactly the same sort of thing as how Merrin's social anxiety entirely switches off after enough hours of frantic emergency work, and it's - clearly a social maneuver - whereas Merrin's entire thing is that at some point you can exhaust her to the point that she STOPS doing social maneuvers vaguely aimed at some sense of safety that exists mostly in her own head. But there is still an echo of familiarity there.  

...Farris was not briefed that this in particular was high likelihood but she was, in fact, prepped for the possibility of finding out that she had to cover all of the key communication points in 15-20 minutes. She has a List. 

They are not going to press her on it! Civilization thinks it is pretty understandable for someone who landed in the middle of a TERRIFYING EMERGENCY in another world that they know nothing about to, once the most critical part is over, want some space to orient and decide what they actually want to do about this longer term, and what information they need to verify in order to make that decision - and that, in the meantime, they might want to reserve as much option value as possible, for example by not taking the risk that the place they landed in is not actually trying to cooperatively carry out fair trades, and might instead try to figure out their magic via observation without paying for it. 

It's okay. There are things that Maartje really shouldn't do, but "deciding to take a few weeks or months to learn the language the hard way and verify some facts about dath ilan" is...fine? 

"Understood," Farris says, nodding, not appearing at all upset and only maybe slightly flustered. "We - in that case there are things I need to cover now, and once I do that, possibly we should top-priority getting you on a comms link to someone from Exception Handling who can learn some of your native language in a few minutes, or whether repeating sentences in Baseline back in your own language is a reasonable use of your comprehension conceptual-magic. Priority request to communicate: for you to stay in Governance-approved areas, because if you are biologically human and from another world, you could have foreign diseases that we have no immunity to and could go through our entire population if quarantine is broken. I'm going to be with you in quarantine, as will all of the staff here and almost certainly all of the casualties until Exception Handling figures something else out. We will have supplies and shelter out here and it should be pretty comfortable once things are actually set up. Do you see any issue with that based on context we're lacking, and/or do you have any core needs other than food, water, bathing, sleep, light while not sleeping, something to do while you're awake and the option for social interaction - that's the basics of what humans here need -" 

Baseline is again doing its clipped-fast-communication thing. 

Well, that's - more Lawful Neutral than she was expecting/fearing.

Gods fucking devour it, she's going to have to learn a language the hard way. That's the most wildly upsetting possible state of affairs, somehow. She feels herself wanting to go back on the not using magic purely because she'll have to learn a language. A normal person in her position would be fine, here. "...that is reasonable. I'll need clothes if it gets much colder than this, and a blanket if it gets colder than the freezing point of water. Ideally, if I don't have magic, I would have two sets of clothes so I can be clothed while doing laundry."

Blink blink. Huh. 

"- That's fine. One moment." Subvocalizing to the admin tech back at the medicopter, [can you please get this poor alien woman a robe to wear]. "We can have temporary clothes for you, and the fabricator to adjust some of the prefabbed ones to fit you will be here on one of the later Exception Handling cargo drops. We'll have a bathing facility sooner than that, and laundry facilities although I am not sure if it's worth trying to salvage your - the rest of your current clothing."

It's in fact not especially cold (and definitely won't drop below 0 C), but Maartje is shirtless and covered in drying blood and seems completely unbothered by this. It's sort of impressive. 

"Probability estimate on whether you can eat the same food as we can?" she says. "You look human, there's only one species on dath ilan that looks like us and we know what we can eat, do you have reason to believe you're significantly different - if your world does have multiple humanoid species with different diets that would be a reason. We'll prioritize bringing a wider range of food supplies to try if you think there's above a 25% chance that you have different dietary needs." 

"We have many humanoid species with different diets but humans won't starve on most of them. ...we will starve if we eat nothing but rabbit, and we'll catch scurvy if we haven't any lemons."

That...is a significant update on the material wealth of her society! Less the mention of laundry - maybe it just is fastest and easiest for magic users to look after their own clothes and it wouldn't occur to her that non-magic-users have technology to do it - but two sets of clothing? Phrased as though this is some sort of special request? 

- someone should be on looking at the societal-models and how material wealth and resources probably affects things like overall Coordination and Governance structure and rate of interpersonal physical violence? This is not Khemeth's specialty. 

What the nuclear garbage is that five-syllable Baseline compound word that sounds like a medical term for a particular micronutrient deficiency but that Khemeth has never heard of? ("Severe chronic symptomatic vitamin C deficiency" is mostly not a thing in dath ilan post-history-screen.) He needs to go look that up. 

...Huh. Is that something you would get in a materially poor civilization? Like, really incredibly materially poor, he's looking at what sort of diet someone needs to have to end up with severe chronic symptomatic vitamin C deficiency and that is a horrifyingly degree of food and implied supply-chain insecurity! 

(He also has to look up the Baseline term that 'rabbit' translates to. He's not really a nature person so much. Kalorm would have recognized it.) 

'Scurvy' translates as a five-syllable Baseline compound word, because "severe chronic symptomatic vitamin C deficiency" is mostly not a thing in dath ilan post-history-screen. Fortunately, Carissa is talking to a medtech, who nods. 

"We can do a reasonable varied diet," she says. (Meal replacement shakes, which is what she expects to mostly subsist on for the next few days, and even literal tube feeds, obviously all contain everything the human body needs! But it seems maybe better to give this poor alien woman, who wasn't sure if they would give her two pairs of clothing without explicit request, an array of less processed foods that might be more recognizable as plant or animal products.) 

"- Anyway, while you being safe and having everything you need here is among our higher priorities, we do also need to ensure that Civilization is safe. I'm aware you may not have verified answers to these questions, but you almost certainly have more context than us, so give a probability estimate and indicate degree of uncertainty*. We need to know if dath ilan is in danger. More specifically, a helpful input to that would be whether you expected this to happen to you, or didn't but had a model of it as something that had happened to other people, or that could in principle happen, versus whether it's an much of an Exception to the known physical laws from your perspective as it was for us. Related to that, probability estimate on whether more people are likely to appear, if so whether they may already have appeared, and more broadly whether further contact with other worlds is imminent and 20% / 50% / 80% spread on the timescale for that." 

Going by her tone, she thinks that these are all perfectly reasonable questions to ask.

(And unless she's a very good actress, it's not even slightly intended as a threatening question, and she's thinking of herself as on-Carissa's-team with the self-evident shared goal of "no bad things happen to Civilization.") 

(Not everyone observing this situation is thinking of it in those terms! There are definitely a number of Very Serious People planning for the contigencies where they don't have shared goals and values with the alien, even to the point of mutually beneficial trade being possible. But the medtech hastily retrained as an alien first contact liaison is not thinking of it in those terms.) 

*This entire clause is three syllables. 

"I was probably removed from my universe with a spell that standardly has that effect, though it usually drops people in an adjacent universe that we're familiar with and have, uh, trade-relations with already."

Shit, it's totally the case Cheliax might scry for her and that the best way for these people to prevent that is to execute her. How to avoid telling them that.... 

"From their perspective it probably looks like I died in a fashion that destroyed my body, which happens often enough I wouldn't expect immediate efforts to find me. If they did have reason to think I hadn't died and was retrievable, or if they wanted confirmation I was dead, they'd scry me, which in my home universe would show them either me or my ontologically-basic-mind in a ontologically-basic-mind-dimension. If they saw me they would probably observe to make sure I was all right and then contact me when I was alone. If they couldn't find me or my ontologically-basic-mind then they'd be more worried and confused, that pretty much never happens, and look harder." That part is probably false but she thinks she's safer if the locals believe it.

"It also seems possible your world is far enough from our normal ones that even the spells that work across worlds wouldn't work to find you or transit here, considering how if you really don't have afterlives then you are probably outside Creation entirely. The other possibility being that you do have afterlives but for some reason no one was allowed to tell you, and if that's true then it's much likelier someone'll try to contact me but also we don't really need to worry about those possibilities since in those everything's just going to be fine in the long run. 

...I don't know how to turn any of this into your numbers," she adds apologetically, because the language keeps wanting her to be more specific when she chooses a hedging word. 

(Tongues is CONFUSED about how to translate 'Creation', because it sort of seems like it should be 'Greater Reality' but the connotations don't line up at all and it's a proper noun in Taldane. Tongues goes for 'most-recent-iteration-of-the-local-multiverse'.) 

The what now. 

- Farris really wants to know about the...most...recent...iteration...of the "local" "multiverse"?? What does that mean???!!! They - have contact between universes in some sort of local universe cluster??? 

(Which, well, if that's a thing then possibly some of those had a First Contact, at some point...) 

Anyway! The situation sounds really complicated! Farris also isn't sure what to do with it without probabilities! 

"- Whether or not they scry you seems important," she says. "The numbers is - it's just to avoid miscommunicating if we don't have the same underlying sense of how unlikely you're thinking when you say you 'wouldn't expect.' Is it one in three? One in ten? One in fifty?" 

"- well, I don't know. It's not like a spell with a failure chance, or like guessing if you need backup or not, it depends on whether my commanding officer saw what happened and whether anyone has a Scry free at the end of the day. ...which they do on eight days out of ten, I can use numbers for things like that."

??????????????????????

What does she mean it's not– it seems basically analogous to "guessing if you need backup or not", something Merrin has to do all the time in conditions of uncertainty, and the fact that it's more uncertainty just means a wider spread...

...You know what, it doesn't super seem like the time to try to figure out the source of the misunderstanding. Come to think of it, who knows what the mysterious translation conceptualmagic is even conveying to the alien magic user, maybe it's coming out the other side as something totally different. 

"Noted." She listens to her earbud for a moment. "Can you, uh, give us the one-minute description of your...local region of Lesser Reality? The thing you said that translated as 'most-recent-iteration-of-the-local-multiverse' but I'm not, uh, sure that's coherent as a concept and I don't know what you meant to say on your side, since we don't understand how the translation conceptualmagic works." 

"The spatially-continuous-dimension I'm from is called the Material Plane. It has lots of worlds around lots of stars and most of them are inhabited by aliens. With magic we can also access other spatially-continuous-dimensions - the places where ontologically-basic-minds go, the places of ontologically-basic-elements, the First World which was the creators' first attempt at the Material, and a couple of others. All of those are within the local multiverse, which is a - bubble, maintained by Pharasma and the other ancient entities, so things that are big and beyond our comprehension don't eat us all. - the ancient entities are very good at their jobs and we aren't at risk of getting eaten or anything, we're much better off than you guys, everyone's ontologically-basic-minds are safe at least in the ontologically-basic-mind-place that Asmodeus is Chief Executive of. In general you can't scry out of the local multiverse and can't Plane Shift out of it and if you did end up out of it you can't get back in.

The thing I'm trying to figure out is whether you are a little bit of the local multiverse where the entities bargained for none of them to interfere at all -- in which case you probably do have afterlives and I can probably get home -- or whether I got dropped out of the local multiverse somehow.

I don't know enough about other worlds in Creation to guess which. But if Cheliax can find me here or I can get home, then everything's going to be okay and you almost certainly do have ontologically basic minds after all, I'm so sorry that no one told you. So I'm only actually concerned about and being careful for the possibilities that you're outside the local multiverse."

Back on server backend, listening to this conversation:

There's an obvious (albeit incoherent, insensible, ridiculous, and not even slightly predicted on priors) partially-woven-together story you could try to rapidly put together, if you are aware of some things that only 0.1% of the population is cleared to know:

- "Things that are big and beyond our comprehension" sounds like how you might describe 'superintelligence' to somebody who wasn't cleared to know what a superintelligence was.
- An obvious thought is that "Pharasma and the other ancient entities" would have to be superintelligences in order to build a bubble that superintelligences couldn't get inside; however:
- "Maartje" doesn't particularly look like something put together by a superintelligence; she's not a sort of thing that should exist inside a superintelligence optimizing for inscrutable alien things.
- Maartje can also fly and slow down crashing aircraft, and seems to view this as a conceptualmagic primitive of alternativephysics rather than a direct gift or mechanism, and to think she has an ontologically-basic-mind.  This doesn't exactly seem like a strictly biological organism whose biology and physics nobody meddled with?
- Superintelligences can fake weapons looking less optimized than they really are, of course.  But if a superintelligence is fighting dath ilan seriously, Maartje spewed nanomachines all over the atmosphere the moment she arrived.  If dath ilan were targetable by superintelligences in that way, dath ilan would have been eaten earlier and more directly, long before Maartje showed up.
- Superintelligences with a weird choice of utility function for some reason leaving dath ilan undisturbed, plus the alternative "leaving whole galaxies undisturbed, actually" else "ate the galaxies, but replaced all of the Solar System's incoming photons and/or hacked the telescopes to make the now-eaten galaxies look undisturbed", was always one of the possible alternative solutions to the Great Silence besides the standard inference "Civilization is early and will meet aliens in a billion years or so". 

This state of confusion does not yet admit of having a single story forced upon it.  It does suggest two priority questions:

- Priority question one:  Does Maartje's materialization here potentially open this place to invasion by the things that are big and beyond comprehension, or negate the hypothetical agreement preventing intereference here?
- Priority question two:  Does Maartje's home multiverse permit spatial FTL, including by going to another plane as an intervening step?  Does it allow time travel?  (This affects which equilibria of Maartje's home multiverse are consistent; changes how much time Civilization has to respond; or in some cases makes expected future interference less probable because if it were possible it would've already happened.)

Oh, and if the Basement hadn't already been instructed to storm ahead full speed on a Limited Creation, it would've been thus instructed now; but they already sent that instruction as soon as they realized they had no longer had any idea how Existence worked or what couldn't happen next.

(Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh?????????????!!!!!!!) 

- one thing that dath ilani medtechs learn – even if they don't work for Exception Handling and have Merrin's level of experience with "bizarre sim scenarios where they have to make judgement calls while missing half the context because the context is infohazard-sealed" – is how to keep all of your internal screaming purely internal, or as close to it as possible. It's okay. This sounds like AS MANY AS SEVERAL INFOHAZARDS but that's fine. She will just - listen and remember the literal content and not try to figure out the implications while she waits for someone to tell her what to say. 

(Farris' expression is - maybe a bit surprised or startled? She does not otherwise look at all alarmed.) 

(This is good! Khemeth has some concerns about how not-Maartje, who is already clearly scared - and for reasons that are at least being narrowed down, if not entirely clear yet - might respond, if she observes that dath ilan is reacting with alarm.) 

Priority questions are relayed to Farris! The delay isn't more than 1.5 seconds after Maartje finishes speaking. 

(Also, the first-rank Keeper who was most recently coordinating casualty care in the makeshift-Complicated Patient Area is nearly finished handing off all of that context, and can take over soon, but Exception Handling can just give Farris a script to answer these next few questions, and one of their considerations here is not making it any more salient than it already is to Maartje that the explanation she just gave has high-stakes implications.) 

...Farris nods. 

"- So the followup question is - does your arrival here change the situation regarding whether and to what extent dath ilan is open to invasion by the– the things that are big and beyond comprehension? Or negate a hypothetical agreement preventing those - things - from interfering here?" 

Carissa is not that easy to bluff and she can notice if someone is startled. What - what process on their end, because it's not this person, this person's just reciting as ordered from her little earpiece like the one they gave Carissa - what did they infer -

"I don't know anything about the things outside Creation," she says. "I'm sorry. I don't - I don't know what the rules are. I didn't break any rules I know about. I don't - I've never heard of a superintelligence-agreement that would stop applying if a random person teleported into the middle of it."

The Baseline word for 'superintelligence' is, somewhat unusually, not a compound word, and its meaning isn't etymologically evident from the phonemes. This is deliberate; it slightly reduces the damage if a conversation is somehow overheard when it shouldn't be. 

Farris has no idea what that word is! (She's pretty sure from the phonemes that it's a Baseline word she just hasn't learned, rather than a word in Maartje's native language that her translation conceptualmagic isn't translating because dath ilan lacks the concept.) 

The obvious deduction is that the concept itself is infohazard-sealed, and her secrecy-oath clearance isn't high enough to know it. The second obvious deduction is that this conversation may be headed for Keeper takeover very soon. She's going to actually wait for that instruction, though, and in the meantime, she's not exactly trying to block out the word or not make any inferences about what sort of ********-agreement generally wouldn't stop applying if a random person teleported into the area affected by it, but she's not prioritizing thinking about it either. She still has other instructions to carry out. 

"Second followup question. Do you know if your world allows faster-than-lightspeed travel?" And since the alien from the incredibly materially poor world who apparently lacks training in assigning probabilities to things may not have had a comprehensive science education, "- light has a maximum speed, and if your world's transport magic can teleport someone from one place to a very distant place in the same plane instantaneously, or in less time than light would take to travel the straight-line distance - including by routing through another plane - then that would violate our known physical laws. Related question, do you know of any magic that directly does time travel?" 

"Time Stop yes, time travel no, except in stories that aren't very reliable. If you Teleport across the world and back you'll arrive back a count of ten after you left, a count of two if you used quickened Teleports. But that's because the spell takes time to cast, not because you experience it as taking time in transit - I haven't noticed light having a maximum speed?"

"Light has a maximum speed here, and - at least according to our understanding of how our universe works, it's fundamental to the physical laws that let stars and planets form and life evolve - uh, I've been assuming your material plane has stars and planets but I should actually check that. Lightspeed is very fast. It would take slightly over a second for light to reach our moon, and about three minutes for it to reach the fourth planet, but lightspeed delays on a single planet are measured in fractions of a second. If your star system has multiple planets and a teleport spell between them exists, and takes the same length of time as a same-planet teleport, that would imply faster-than-lightspeed travel." 

"We have stars and planets, humans are very small and weak, the stars are very great and far by comparison to us," she says with the rapid fluency of someone rattling off trained theology. And then, at more the pace of thought, "Stories-claiming-historical-origin-of-unknowable-truth-value-spread-recreationally of great wizards say they could Teleport between worlds but nothing about how long it took them. No one alive today can do that. I do buy that people did it at some point because there are some species not native to Golarion that live there now."

Sorry, their word for 'legends' is what?

Various pieces of that are interesting, mostly in a way where Farris' brain is wildly trying to map them to the closest fictional tropes. The first bit is...weird...both in the content and in the tone. The second half is just confusing.

(Legends of the type that Golarion has are not especially a genre that dath ilan post-history screen has. Speculative fiction exists, of course, including fiction that speculates about the past, where the author is trying to reconstruct as plausible an image as possible, but this is still very much clearly flagged as fiction. The closest sociological phenomenon might be, well, the stories that get spread as a result of pranks or faked Conspiracies, like "Merrin is secretly a Sparashki", but you wouldn't call that the same thing, and you wouldn't call the truth value of it unknowable.) 

If they don't know about lightspeed then they probably also don't have the engineering tech needed for non-magical travel even to their moon, let alone other distant star systems. 

"Are there a lot of, uh, stories spread recreationally about powerful magic users in the distant past doing things that nobody can do now? If so, do you know the reason claimed for why that was lost – is it because the powerful magic users kept it secret and didn't teach their students, or was there a period with no magic users powerful enough to learn it, or some other way the information was lost - or has it gotten harder to do even if the method were known?" 

...Come to think of it, it's odd that any historical knowledge could be permanently lost, if everyone goes to an ontologically-basic-mind-plane when they die? Right? It was at least strongly implied that communication and trade exist between the "Material Plane" and the ontologically-basic-mind-plane(s). And if that's true, wouldn't someone at some point have decided to buy the knowledge from the ontologically-basic-minds of the powerful magic users who could teleport between planets? 

"There often aren't any wizards capable of casting spells of the ninth-standard-degree-of-complexity, and the ones who are that powerful benefit from their capabilities not being fully known, and the person who develops a powerful spell usually does not teach anyone."

That...sounds like some kind of economic failure? Farris of course doesn't know enough about all the other factors of the situation to conclude this very confidently, but - it definitely sounds like something went wrong? 

"This question may be premised-on-assumptions-that-are-false*, but - why are the wizards capable of casting spells of the ninth-standard-degree-of-complexity– I'm going to define a local-to-this-conversation-shorthand**, why are ninth-degree-wizards not more strongly incentivized to teach others any new spells they develop? ...In the types of societal systems I know of, that would be an obvious exploitable-economic-inefficiency." 

*A two-syllable Baseline word.

**A four-syllable Baseline word.

" - well, I don't think ninth circle wizards really want anything money can buy? What with how they're ninth circle wizards."