I do not possess interworld transit under my own power. I suspect several people of my acquaintance are working on it. I'm pretty confused about how the last several interworld transits happened and can't guess how long it'll take them to find me, or if they'll be able to do so. She doesn't sound distressed about it. Obviously she has important work at home, but it's not actionable and so not a good use of thought, and transiting the worlds is so far turning up a lot more valuable options for her than it did for Aroden and is plausibly worth it even if it forces Him to step in and save Golarion, or even if Golarion is lost.

(That one superweapon of Urtho's - not the time to think about that, either.)

I am sure there'll be time to figure it out. That just seems like an oddly lackadaisical stance towards being paid for a dozen different intended-to-be-lifesaving medical interventions and the attention of several high ranking paid specialists.

(Well, see, Marian gets paid the same amount either way. Possibly the surgeon would have more opinions about it, she thinks they're paid per-case.) 

The respiratory therapist is hiding at one of the computers at the end of the hall with her sandwich. Marian clears her throat. "Hey."

....Oh NO it has somehow ONLY JUST NOW occurred to her that the RT was, in fact, not in the room for The Explanation. Shit. Where's the charge nurse, can she chicken out of explaining, she has already explained once and that was ENOUGH... 

"- The burns patient is satting at 97% on BiPAP and I think we could try nudging the settings down," she says, instead of actually explaining anything. 

The respiratory therapist raises her eyebrows but will follow Marian to the room. 

....She raises her eyebrows a lot more when she sees Iomedae (sort of) dressed. 

Oh no did Iomedae try to get dressed on her own when Marian was in the hallway. Marian is so irresponsible. She will hurry over to check that Iomedae was careful with her IV sites and art line and that her sat probe is still in place. 

She was careful but in the fashion of a person who has never encountered any of these things and has no idea what they're doing for her. The sat probe has fallen off and she pulled out one IV while putting on her shirt. 

She looks better all the same. She smiles at Marian.

...Well, she still has two other IVs that were not at that moment connected to anything, Marian unhooked the blood products line once it was done. She will just swap the fentanyl infusion to a different IV. And put the sat probe back. It doesn't look like the IV site is bleeding (it's hard to tell since it's mostly gauze-wrapped along with the rest of her arms) so Marian will just leave that alone for now. 

Iomedae smiling is mostly not even horrifying now???? Most of her body is bandaged, and her face isn't completely visible behind the slightly humidity-fogged-BiPAP mask and the hydrocolloid dressings padding the edges of it, but it looks like she's no longer leaking blood and pus from her bodily surfaces???? 

You do look a lot better, Marian sends with almost proprietary pride. Her patient is SO COOL. 

The RT is mostly just looking at whether her breathing is labored and what her sats are. (She wasn't the one on hand for the bronch, and overall has incomplete context on this patient, she knows everyone was freaking out but maybe the pulmonologist who bronched her was just overreacting?) 

Her breathing is pretty good! Her sats are staying at 97%!

...All right, sure. She can try breathing only 50% oxygen with moderately lower support settings on the BiPAP, and see how that goes for the next ten minutes. 

"- Can you monitor her?" the respiratory therapist asks Marian. "If you don't mind, I'd like to finish my lunch." 

"Sure. Uh, if she's fine in ten minutes, can I try her on just the regular oxygen mask? I'll put the BiPAP right back if she's having trouble, I do know how." 

Marian is bizarrely impatient about this but fine whatever. 

...She'll park herself by Iomedae's bed and watch her very closely and be available to answer more questions about Earth if they come up. 

I have lots more questions but they can wait if you have other responsibilities, I don't think I need healing supervision at this point. 

She's doing a bit worse with less oxygen - 93% - but hasn't actually noticed because the burns all over her body are a lot more distracting. 

I don't actually have other patients right now, you were in really bad shape when you arrived and we expected based on how normal humans work that (well, most likely that she would die and then Marian would be available to take other patients again) you would stay in really bad shape for longer. 

Marian is in fact obscenely behind on charting, to the extent that she hasn't exactly done any charting, but has honestly been putting it off because there are so many weird things going on. EPIC does not have boxes in the flowchart for legendary superhoeroes who recover from burns that ought to be lethal in a matter of hours.

She...should at least chart the assessments from before Iomedae regained consciousness, though, that's - well, also weird, but a kind of weird that the flowchart boxes will accommodate. ...She is quietly embarrassed at putting down 0 for urine output because from the point the armor came off there was not, at any point, a good time to try to place a catheter on her skinless patient. 

She watches to see if Iomedae's sats stay above 90% for the whole ten minutes. 

They do. 

I think most humans where I am from would have been dead had they sustained such injuries. Though also they probably wouldn't have sustained the injuries in the first place, the initial blast would have killed them.

...Yeah, I don't think anyone super expected you to survive at first, but your heart was still beating and we weren't going to just not try - we didn't know what'd happened and, like, maybe it looked worse than it was somehow, which I guess sort of turned out to be true but not the way we thought. - though you weren't breathing when they found you, I'm not sure how legendary superheroes work or whether that would've fixed itself too? 

She is going to ask Iomedae what happened later, it feels pretty rude right now. Uh, anyway, I'm not sure it's a great idea to go straight to no help breathing - your oxygen levels did drop a bit - but we can try just the normal oxygen mask, it's a lot more comfortable. 

I don't think I have stopped breathing before. I believe it is possible for me to drown. I wouldn't have guessed it was possible for me to drown out of water but I can't say I've given it very much thought. - I die frequently. 

Marian switches out the tight uncomfortable mask for a significantly less uncomfortable mask, that feels like it probably wouldn't even interfere very much with talking. (She's setting it to 50% oxygen for now, the same as on the BiPAP, but she can go higher if Iomedae seems to need that to compensate for losing the pressure support.) 

...If you had been on another world near a body of water right before all - this - that would explain some extremely confusing observations, they found you with your lungs more or less full of water. Reno's in a desert so it was pretty baffling. 

Aaaaaaaaand then Marian's brain finishes processing the last part and she has. Different questions. 

Is is, uh, a legendary hero thing to - not, uh, die permanently. We don't have that here. I guess unless you count some things as dying that are things we can fix.  

I was on a raft in the ocean when someone detonated a weapon that boiled the ocean for at least ten miles around, one estimate I got in advance of the event claimed it'd be fifty. I tried to fly away, but I inhaled a lot of steam, fell unconscious, fell into the boiling ocean, and then, I assume, would have drowned, except instead I arrived here. 

The gods can empower their priests to resurrect people. It is costly, if you don't get to it near-instantly, and ordinary people cannot afford it. I have been resurrected more often than most people because I am a legendary hero and usually worth resurrecting even when it's costly. 

If I die here I would expect to be resurrected at home, but that's not what happened when the superweapon went off so now I am moderately confused about how interworld resurrection and so on work. 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH??????!!!!!!!!!!!

- unprofessional to give any sign of her internal screaming. Marian takes a deep breath. I'm so sorry that happened. And yeah, that's sort of confusing. Both of which are super inane things to say but she's out of insightful things. 

Is Iomedae's oxygen saturation managing to stay above 90% even without the BiPAP support? 

Yep!

It actually worked out quite well, she says. I think no one else got hurt - they gave me an ultimatum, so I was able to go to an isolated location - and hopefully it will not be disruptive to the ceasefire I was negotiating.

Marian is starting to get the feeling that there might have been KIND OF A LOT GOING ON wherever Iomedae was before this, and she's not sure how much if any of it is relevant to Iomedae's treatment but it's giving her an itchy feeling behind her shoulder blades, which is in conflict with the embarrassed feeling that it's really rude to interrogate recovering ICU patients about their lives outside the hospital. 

Ceasefire? 

- they had multiple governments, which were having a war, which is where they settle a political dispute by having people good at doing violence take control of territory previously belonging to the other government, and I was working to get them to agree on assignments of territory to each government which neither of them were motivated to fight over in light of my being there and opposed to them continuing to fight. Where I am from this is done with a formal written agreement to stop further troop incursions and other forms of destruction related to the conflict and to appoint monitors to check if the other side is abiding by their side of the agreement and to have procedures for complaining about further incidents which are not 'resort right back to having the whole war'.

...We do have that there, sorry, I was unclear. Not that Marian knew all of the details of how it's executed and it's actually pretty interesting! I was more asking about, uh, who was having a war, but I guess it's sort of none of my business and you don't have to tell me. 

Maaaaaaybe she will try easing the oxygen concentration on the mask down to 40%? 

92. 

There are a lot of things I am unwilling to share for secrecy reasons but the names of the countries involved in the war isn't particularly one of them, though I also don't expect them to be very meaningful to you. The war was between a country called Tantara and a country called Predain.