We would like to register that while we understand why this is in some sense a pretty sensible thing for the first tag of this glowfic to be, we also hate it.

Anyways,

"Someone from an alternate timeline shows up on Eifwen" is the sort of thing the median Eifweni might end up writing at some point, right? And not all works in that subgenre are really going to be going all that hard on the realism, but some of them are. So they have put, like, any thought into this scenario, despite it being so fantastical. Some people were paid to spend some time thinking hard about what to do, if Eifwen ends up in a scenario like this one. And if you've done that, you might as well send your conclusions off to the Weird Crap division of the planet-level Emergency Services to file in a cabinet somewhere.

But the Institutions know that they collectively have a limited amount of leeway, before (way more) people will start getting fed up with them. And they'd really prefer to err pretty far away from that point, if they can. So they haven't gone and handed down any instructions that they're going to firmly ask for compliance with, about this. It's not the kind of thing that's going to happen in real life, they don't need to spend any Compliance Points on it.

They'll predictably pay rather a lot, if someone goes and decides to cooperate with them anyways. But, y'know, it's the kinda thing they'll happily negotiate about a bit.

So eventually, Celene wakes up. As she becomes more lucid, she will notice that she is on a couch, tucked in with a blanket. 

Ah, shoot.

To be fair, this is fairly expected: You can't experience nonexperience, so if there is a-

Wait.

A couch?

She killed herself on a hotel bed, if she somehow survived she'd expect to wake up either there, or on a hospital bed, not-

Where is she?

She'll try to push herself up to look around a bit more. There's probably a mundane explanation for all of this.

"Oh hey, you're awake! Hi!"

"Who are you and why the hell were you passed out on my doorstep, exactly?"

It's not English, but Celene can understand it anyways. For some reason.

What.

That doesn't make any sense at all, actually.

Ok, yes, brain damage is probably expected if she survived that but Celene has not heard anything about it causing psychosis

Can she speak this mysterious language?

"Um.

I don't know."

"You... don't know... who you are? Should I be calling an ambulance?"

"I don't know how I got here or what's going on. I'm- My name is Celene."

"Hi Celene! I'm Summer. I know you're like, probably super disoriented right now, but you surely have a better idea than I do about what events led to this so can you please give you best guess or two even if they really suck?"

"My best guess is that I'm currently having a major psychotic episode or some other variation of 'either my senses or my memory do not meaningfully correspond to reality.' I-"

Probably it is not a good idea to mention that she committed suicide. Most people frown on that.

"I remember dying in a different location from here, I do not have any explanation for how I ended up here or 'on your doorstep.'

Oh, and the most confusing part is that you are speaking in a language that I am completely unfamiliar with and yet for some reason am still capable of communicating in, which pretty strongly points towards psychosis or a similar thing."

Ugh, her head hurts. She does not want to think too hard about this.

...Yeah okay sure that sounds like psychosis, maybe? She actually does not have any idea what psychosis is like.

Celene seems fairly stable. She'll pull out her phone and text (marked as urgent) one of her friends that seems likely to know more about this than she does and ask if this is an ambulance sort of problem or if she can just, like, sit and talk with her for a while? She'd rather do the sit and talk thing and really she thinks individual love and support can do better than the hospital system a lot of the time.

...You're a sufficiently grounded person that you can probably use your judgment here?

Fantastic. Now where to start?

"Hm. Elaborate more on... would you rather talk about the dying part or the language thing?"

Alright, Celene has recovered enough mental function to do more than automatic response.

"The language we are speaking is not one that I remember knowing or recognizing, the language I am most familiar with is called English, and sounds like this."

She switches to English and says, "Hello, my name is Celene. Lovely weather today. How are you doing?"

Is she still capable of speaking English?

Sure, let's say she's still capable of speaking English.

Essentially everyone knows Eifweni. Many regions still use their historical language at least a bit, and some cities use some other conlang or something.

Summer is like, vaguely familiar with the existence of most of the natural language families but she hasn't actually studied any second language. So when she doesn't recognize English at all that isn't super surprising.

She's gonna look it up on her phone. She types in the Eifweni characters for /ejŋgl/, goes back and forth for a moment on what exactly that second vowel was and then decides to just try all the ones vaguely near the /i/ corner of the vowel triangle. Nothing turns up. 

Okay that's kinda weird.

"Okay, so, uh, that sure sounded like you know a second language but I cannot find any information about it. When did you learn it? Where are you from?"

"There... does not appear to be a word for the city I am from. I could... point to the rough geographic location? Do you have a map/globe/whiteboard of some sort?"

"There wouldn't be... we'd just loan the local name, which is presumably an English word?"

But sure she can have a map. Geographically, it looks just like Earth, modulo the tiny bits of terraforming that you can manage even at Earth or Eifwen's tech level. There mostly aren't really any borders per se, but there are marks where the biggest cities are.

She locates the continent of North America, then the vague general location of Seattle, which luckily happens to be on a very recognizable coastline.

"I'm from 'Seattle.' And I've known English all my life, it was the first language I learned."

"...'s it like, a rural community, or something? I'm not super familiar with the Pacific coast of North America but I don't think there's a city named 'Seattle' there."

(She pronounces it /sijædo/.)

"It's... a major population center? A few million people live in the area. Wait, where do you claim we are right now?"

She points to about where Peru'd be.

"We're in Nucleus... Seattle's a major population center? No it isn't."

"Ok, I have pretty much no idea what is going on, then."

Other than, of course, the whole anthropic thing, but she still doesn't have a good explanation for why... all this would happen instead of her just waking up in a hospital, or discovering that the nitrogen gas wasn't entirely pure, or she didn't set it up properly or something like that.

Well, what should she do now?

...Should she kill herself again?

In theory, if she considered the argument that reducing the amount of Celene-suffering in Greater Reality was worth it before, she should consider it worth it now, because she'd be eliminating the same proportion of herself.

She cannot, in fact, find any flaws with this argument but it does seem somewhat unsustainable.

Also, this world could plausibly be better and probably she should stick around and gather more information.

If she's experiencing psychosis or trapped in a simulation or something, she... doesn't actually know what is appropriate to do in that situation. Generally the recommended advice is "seek medical help" but the delusion seems strong enough that she's not sure she can contact outside help from within it? That might just be some sort of rationalization though.

Alternatively, maybe her memories of living on Earth was a psychotic delusion, she lived... wherever she is right now her entire life, and made everything up. It would explain how she can speak the language. This is, of course, ignoring the obvious fact that this is not how psychotic disorders work but she does not actually have a better explanation.

Well, given that, the plan would be, get situated, figure out her immediate physical needs, how she's going to get-

Ugh. Food and shelter and everything. She does not want to deal with that. That's Not Something she wants to deal with.

But her host, who Celene is realizing she doesn't know the name of, probably cannot keep her around forever.

"I just realized, I never asked your name?"