"No.  My brain just thinks I'll lose the money."

"Your 4 against my 7, so that even if you lose that bet you're still ahead on the flight, assuming it all had an ultimately mundane cause at the end."

"Sold!"

...no escort flight has shown up an hour later.

The cloud cover below turns partial, with sporadic gaps.  The pilots briefly tilt the plane to one side and then the other, while somebody with binoculars looks out through the screening grille at the gappy cloud-sea, to try to spot a coverage gap that goes all the way to whatever's below.

The plane is confirmed to still be over ocean... well, over water... well, over enough water in at least some places to appear in shafts through the cloud cover.  In principle they could be overflying a large lake.  But mostly, this is taken as, "We expected to be over the ocean and we're over the ocean."

People are trying to do napkinback estimates on whether they ought to be able to expect to see container ships crossing the ocean, if they overfly a bigger break in the cloud cover.  Container ships should definitely be visible from their height; those are large.  Calculations confidently imply that there's enough container ships traveling between those two continents that if they were distributed evenly or randomly across the waters, the plane would definitely expect to spot one if they flew out of the clouds.

Unfortunately, there is no reason why container ship routes should be distributed randomly; quite the opposite.  Those routes will be optimized, and nobody on board knows the details.  So even a total lack of container ships seen on the waters below, if the clouds clear up further on, would not be proof positive that something mysterious has happened.

There are now passenger committees planning for the following possibilities, among others:

- Something Happened To Civiliation, which disabled all the shortwave stations that are powerful enough to transmit to Flight 43 at a level that onboard radio could receive, and this means there's no support from Civilization after this plane lands either.

- The plane has been Mass-Isekaied to an Uninhabited World.

- Isekai to Inhabited World with Cultural Aliens / or Actual Aliens.

Thellim has joined the third of these committees.  She has read much fiction on this subject; and that does actually count for something, in a world where most primary fiction is written and critiqued by people smarter than her.

(Keltham has not joined any of these committees on account of still being pretty sure that this plane is going to land in an otherwise functional dath ilan, whatever criminal shenanigans were going on.  So even if he tried joining a committee like that, his money wouldn't really be on it, and that being the case he'll let other passengers go ahead of him.)

Anyways!  Somebody on board in fact does have an e-reader with all seven standard primary volumes of Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts!

Some background, in case the whole backstory there isn't obvious just from the title:

There is in dath ilan a literary custom that if you write an isekai protagonist, and you desire that isekai protagonist to be realistic in a certain sense, then you, the author, don't look up anything that your protagonist would need to just remember without any books or libraries or Network access or experts to consult.  Not all isekai protagonists are written to this rule, but some are.

This metaliterary trope is sufficiently established in dath ilan to have its own supporting literary industries.  For example, experts you can hire, so that, if you think your protagonist remembers how to synthesize sulfuric acid, the expert will tell you what would happen from the protagonist's perspective inside the story after trying what you write down.  Without you, the author, needing to look it up, and thereby contaminating your own memory.

Literally nobody remembers a time when this metaliterary trope has not existed; it's the sort of thing that was instantly reinvented after the second stage of the Great Screen.  It isn't named after anyone any more than the first hundred integers are said to have been discovered by somebody.  If there was a point in dath ilani history when this trope was coined, it's long since been forgotten.

It would of course be terrifically shameful to claim you were writing to this metaliterary trope and then steal a glance in an encyclopedia.  That's the sort of literary misconduct where, if proven to 90% credibility, it'll get you denied residence in the sort of cities that prefer to be only inhabited by people not previously proven to have been dishonest to over 90% credibility.  And excluded from a lot more friendship circles than that.

But of course, nobody really thinks of doing that, when they consider the question of how to make their metaliterary-trope-abiding literary protagonist more impressive.

If they want their protagonist to do realistically better, they'll just have to learn that knowledge themselves!

...and again, this metaliterary trope has existed for as long as dath ilan's short memory remembers; and in dath ilan, when people want something, they are willing to pay something for it; and if a lot of people want something, industries will spring up specialized in meeting that want.

There are, obviously, this really should go without saying, hundreds upon thousands of books promising to improve your realistic-self-inserts, by offering mnemonics and exercises meant to help you retain knowledge about things an isekai protagonist might need to know.  You can look at the statistics about whether authors' characters did in fact remember them right; and what the conditional probability markets said about the chance that the author would've done better with a different book, in case that's just a non-causal correlation in a way the market knows about.  If you really care you can even spin up a conditional probability market on yourself.

There are 10-active-day training-camps you can run yourself through, for learning the sort of hands-on knowledge you would need to be the best possible isekai protagonist--though most authors and future authors don't go that far.

But, that said, there is an obvious stumbling-block here to be wary of, when it comes to self-education in order to improve your isekai protagonists.

There is perhaps a certain sketchiness if you-the-author read an isekai-protagonist-self-improvement book about chemistry, and then, what do you know, your story protagonist encounters a chemistry-related problem in the novel you-the-author started writing one week after you virtuously put that chemistry book away and virtuously didn't peek.

To be clear, if for other reasons you've honestly lived your life researching industrial acid synthesis, and then you decide to write a novel about an isekai protagonist who luckily used to work in the chemical industry, using their expertise in an alien economicmagical world, that's universally agreed to be fine and cool.  That's the author's real strength that the isekai protagonist is showing off.

But since that's so cool, it would be shameful to try to look that cool, by a sleight-of-hand, when you're not actually that cool.  Shameful, and dishonest.  Most isekai protagonists, one assumes, would not get a chance to go back in time and read exactly the right book they needed, one week before getting isekaied.  So if you read exactly the right book, one week before you start writing the self-insert story, that's a way of making the character look better-read than you'd actually be in a realistically similar situation.

If your isekai protagonist gets unrealistically lucky that way, you declare it explicitly, by mentioning in-story how your protagonist read the same book you did, one week before getting isekaied.  To do otherwise would be dishonest and shameful.

One might say that the whole point of this metaliterary trope--once declared to be in force--is to have the isekai protagonist look only as well-prepared as the author actually is.  Any impressionable person of the appropriate gender who reads a novel with the blazon of this trope upon its cover, and gets all starry-eyed about how knowledgeable the protagonist seems to be, should not be disappointed when they attempt to date the actual author.

But of course everyone on dath ilan who reads self-insert isekai fiction at all, has heard of the seven-volume book series whose title is literally just "Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts", and it hardly stretches credulity even a tiny little bit if an isekai protagonist happens to have read it!

That is to say:  There's an obvious use for a focal point in this industry, so this facet of dath ilan has carefully put together that focal point, since there's not room for multiplicity.

One could go on about how this edited compendium is assembled, by verdict of fandom and verdict of prediction markets, to contain all the most successful bits of isekai protagonist self-improvement that has done well out of previous books on the subject--along of course with references, and thereby advertisements, to the isekai-protagonist-self-improvement books they were taken from--and what happens in terms of royalties if a later author devises a marginally improved version of a rhyming parable for how to make sulfuric acid, where most of the innovation was in the earlier version--but that's not the point right now.

The point is, declaring that a protagonist happens to have read all seven volumes of Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts is practically a free action in terms of the story's burden-of-improbability; tons and tons of people have read those volumes in real life!  Your protagonist doesn't even need to be an isekai fiction writer!  People will read those books just because they're interesting!  And because almost everyone in the world feels deep down like how well they would industrialize another world in an isekai scenario is a valid measure of their self-actualization and their worth as a human being!

The fact that somebody on board literally has a physical copy of Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts is evidence against this plane being in a trope-abiding isekai scenario, really.  Having your character take a physical copy of Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts with them on the isekai, and not need to remember any of it, would just be odd.

To be clear, there's plenty of stories in dath ilan that don't obey all the standard tropes, and are, on quite deliberate purpose, odd.  Thellim is just saying that, if they find themselves in another world with a physical copy of Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts and no need to remember any material it covers, they should keep watch for strange inversions of other tropes too.

The e-reader with those seven volumes, alas, is in the cargo compartment of the plane, not in the passenger cabin.  In the event that there's no sign of Civilization, or signs of primitive alien Civilization, where the landing pad was supposed to be, the Ad-Hoc Passenger Committee on Inhabited-Destination Mass Isekai Scenarios recommends that the e-reader with these books be retrieved from the cargo compartment even if it means risking somebody's true life to do it.  The pilots should be asked--if this scenario develops, or seems to be developing--not to crashland the plane in a way that risks damaging the cargo compartment; there's genuinely important stuff in there.

Some engineering care has already gone into not just completely abandoning the cargo compartment if the plane needs to do an unpaved-land or water landing!  Yes, the passengers' lives are more important, but dath ilan doesn't feel the need to show how virtuous they are when it comes to not caring about mere possessions.  Sometimes people put things they care about in their luggage.

If the plane made a water landing, it would not, of course, sink.  In many plausible scenarios, like "suddenly needing to land into rough waters in the middle of the ocean", you would want to keep everyone on the plane for a while rather than entrusting them to inflatable boats.  So the plane can float indefinitely, if you cut loose the engines and some of the wings; not literally through hurricanes, but in fairly rough waters.

It'd be possible to access the cargo compartment from the cabin, once water-landed, via opening an emergency hatch.  Keeping the cargo compartment watertight is part of how the plane stays afloat.

If there's really no sign of Civilization at what inertial positioning claims to be their destination, it will be a very hard choice between "find someplace that looks flat enough to land" and doing a water landing.  Some thought has been given toward giving a water-landed plane the ability to beach itself afterwards, or land such that it bleeds velocity at just the right rate given prevailing winds until the airplane slowly glides into what looks like an unobstructed beach... but that is iffy.  Alternatively, trying to get all the passengers onto inflatable life-rafts, and get them all to shore... you could lose somebody that way.  You could lose somebody, all available ways.

The onboard market says it doesn't particularly expect no sign of Civilization once they get to where inertial positioning would place their landing runway, but the Captain is thinking it through anyways.  You can't trust market prices denominated in assets that don't mean anything if Civilization has vanished; and there is not a known solidified exchange rate between Civilization-dependent asset prices and "unskilled labor after landing, conditional on Civilization being gone".

His own mind keeps going back to the question of what happens if they get to where the Air Traffic Exception station is supposed to be, with a runway facing the ocean; and the cloud cover is still solid, and their short-range emergency radio hears nothing from the station.

Their plane's emergency route will obviously have been planned in such a way that nobody crashes, even if all planes on dath ilan simultaneously lose comms and switch to their emergency routes... and yet, somehow he's still worried that there will somehow mysteriously be a plane blocking the runway, or, yes, that their inertial guidance has also been sabotaged and there won't be a runway there.

The planned emergency route says to just descend and land on that runway, as you come in from over the ocean.  Doing a preliminary pass and circling the Air Traffic Exception mini-airport is not in the plan.  Maybe that does crash into somebody or something, if all planes in Civilization are having the same problem simultaneously.  But just descending directly into the clouds with intent to land directly on where a runway should be, if there's no visual contact or radio contact, does not seem... very safe.

(Obviously, after today the emergency plans will be revised so that all emergency diversion routes offer an explicit option to circle the Exception airport once before landing.)

All of those decisions are ones she needs to make in the next thirty minutes; they're not that far out from where their landing strip ought to be, if inertial positioning isn't lying to her (and sun-position calculations are backing it up so far).  If this flight was any further from land than that, there'd be a relief pair of pilots on board.  Actually this flight was gently pushing the edges of that limit, on its original flight plan, and theoretically she and her fellow pilot should go off-shift 20 minutes from now.

(In the back of her mind, she takes a brief political moment to appreciate that Civilization is the sort of Chaos-tolerant place where in 20 minutes she can just declare 'Exception!' and go on flying the plane, rather than some well-intentioned regulator having installed aircraft control lockouts to prevent employees from staying on-shift longer than regulations say they're supposed to.  Of course, people in Civilization's Lawful factions all say that's not what they want and of course they would never; but she doesn't really trust them about that, Lawful people can't reliably self-predict what they'd get up to without any Chaotic political opposition to stop them.)

Or to be more exact, in 30 minutes they'll be at the outside range where their short-range air traffic radio ought to be able to reach the Exception-Handling station even through cloud cover.  If, at that point, the short-range radio doesn't seem to work... well, that would not be the correct time to make decisions.  Decisions should be made before then, conditional on that future event occurring.

In 15 minutes they'll start slowing down and descending.

Onboard markets think there's a high chance the air traffic radio will just work.  A hypothetical criminal who is somehow profiting from the airplane being temporarily out of touch with Civilization, but not destroyed, would have little to gain from sabotaging their ATC radio.  It buys only a few more no-contact minutes before the plane actually lands, at the cost of a noticeably greater chance of doing Real Actual Harm.

Time passes.

The clouds are as solid as before.  There is probably a rule somewhere that says to avoid emergency plane diversion routes that need to land through cloud cover, if that's cheap, and in this case it probably was not cheap.

She starts the plane slowing, a bit, and descending, a bit.

Time passes.