Kristy will get her writing implements!

Marian brings them to Samora, looking apologetic about the delay. She’s trying to think of things she could draw to explain, but she’s not sure where to start.

Writing implements! Excellent both in themselves and as a further sign of friendliness. They're really weird writing implements, but it's not hard to figure out how to get them to work. 

The first thing she wants to know is where am I. She draws the haunted lighthouse, and a line for ground level, and seven floors of basements with a sword-wielding stick figure in the sixth one, and then the stick figure again horizontal with a wavy line of bloodstain around it, and then an arrow pointing away from the downed stick figure, and hands the clipboard and pen to Marian. She's expecting an answer like "down two more basements" or "through a secret door" or similar but maybe she's farther afield than that, the walls aren't even stone.

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

....Okay, Marian has spent a full ten seconds staring at the clipboard and, nope, she's got nothing. 

...Maybe Samora is trying to tell her the last thing she remembers - how she was injured - and asking what happened after that during the interval she probably doesn't remember most of? That would make sense. In theory. The specific drawing makes no sense because, while Marian isn't sure where exactly the patient was found, Reno does not as far as she knows contain any creepy fucked-up towers with unreasonable numbers of underground floors. If she's even interpreting the drawing right. 

She turns over a new page and, tongue between her teeth, sketches an ambulance - trying to distinguish it from just a truck by adding the lights on top with rays around them to try to indicate flashing, and a hopefully-at-all-recognizable attempt at the Star of Life symbol with the caduceus inside it that ambulances have on the side. The ambulance can get a drawing of a gurney inside with a stick figure on it with, uh, a bandage around the stick-figure-middle and a blood pressure cuff on the stick-figure arm? And then she draws an arrow and a building with a red cross symbol on it to represent the hospital? 

Does any of that look like it's reducing Samora's confusion at all? 

So she's not under the lighthouse anymore, then. That's . . . disorienting. Might be good, might be bad. She considers asking if Marshall and Tris are here too, but decides she doesn't want to share any information about them in case they're not here and are planning to rescue her.

She draws a rough map of the inner sea, with the Isle of Kortos especially large and detailed to cover the case where she's still on it and the case where she isn't. Then she draws another stick figure in the corner, carefully tears it out, and presents both it and the map to Marian.

...Marian had not thought she could get more confused than she already was, and yet! 

That's - clearly a map. It's not a terribly drawn map, honestly, it's way better than Marian could do herself. It is absolutely definitely not a map of North America, assuming the middle is in fact ocean. Marian is embarrassingly bad at geography and - isn't sure whether she recognizes it? It's maybe familiar? 

Uh. She's going to sanitize her hands and then get out her phone and go zoom out all the way in Google Maps and scroll around looking for - 

- okay, this patient cannot possibly have been in the Mediterranean sea region the last she remembers? - well, it would explain the not speaking English but it absolutely wouldn't explain how she came to show up in Reno - days of amnesia without other deficits is much more a thing in the movies than real life, and Samora didn't even have a head injury. 

Marian is so confused but she'll show Samora the screen of her phone, point out the area the looks kind of vaguely like the map she drew while making a questioning face, and then - where Samora can see it - scroll with her fingers all the way back to North America and zoom back in until Reno is visible, at which point she points at the Reno dot and then gestures at the room around them? 

Samora is technically not completely out of spells. She makes a gesture Marian will have absolutely no chance of interpreting, says a few words exactly as incomprehensible as all the previous ones, and looks utterly boggled when the phone proves to be totally nonmagical.

She wants to take the thing and poke at it; can that happen?

Marian has never actually handed her phone to a patient before! Part of her brain is objecting but it seems to be the same flavor of objection as handing it to a toddler, which is stupid. And it might be against hospital policy or something, and what if her colleagues notice and judge her about it - that's not completely stupid but it's not like it was covered in orientation - it's arguably unprofessional but it's not like Marian is showing Samora her personal emails, which Samora wouldn't be able to read anyway due to clearly not speaking any English. 

...She also has the more pragmatic objection that there sure is disgusting slime coming out of the patient's abdominal incision and, uh, she doesn't know that her patient didn't touch it in the process of removing various tubes. - ugh, whatever, she'll just sanitize it really well afterward with alcohol wipes, it'll survive. Samora can poke it. It seems - important, both to figure out what the heck is going on here and because Marian has been working quite hard on Building Trust with this patient, who seems really freaked out by everything happening. 

Samora attempts to scroll back to look at Avistan, activates the pinch-to-zoom by accident and is fascinated by it, tries and fails to find the Isle of Kortos, then accidentally hits the home button and stares in confusion at the grid of icons. After some staring and poking that ends with opening Google Docs, she hands the device back to Marian, because despite not being detectably magic it is clearly Complicated Wizard Business and she's not wizard material. Also her next question is important and will take a while to draw.

Marian watches her poke at the phone in almost equal fascination. Has she never seen a smartphone before? Is she, like, somehow from some country (perhaps in the vicinity of the Mediterranean) that doesn't use phones and doesn't have modern hospitals? What countries are near there, are any of them super poor? Or maybe she's a time traveller shut up Marian's brain. 

She puts gloves on to retrieve the phone and scrubs it with the antibacterial sani-wipes (hopefully they won't mess up the screen permanently?) and then wipes it down with alcohol swabs. Samora can have the clipboard back while she's doing that, if she seems to want it? 

She does want it! She spends a long time with it and then shows Marian this.

She points at herself, emphatically taps the top left symbol, then gestures at the whole top row more broadly, then points at Marian and holds out the sheet to her with a deeply serious expression.

(Internally she's apologizing to Shelyn for the terrible sketch and wishing she remembered any of the other Tian or Vudran deities' holy symbols well enough to draw them, and wondering whether she'll be able to notice if Marian lies.)

What????? 

Clearly this is really important to her patient!! Marian feels really terrible that she has NO FUCKING IDEA what the question is! 

She takes the clipboard anyway and stares at it. What. Why is there a grid. What do any of the items drawn (some of which she can't actually recognize as objects per se) have to do with each other. Is this, like, one of those brainteaser puzzles where she's supposed to figure out which of the boxes is not like the others? Why is her patient giving her a confusing riddle as though it's the most intensely serious thing in the world??? 

Nope, sorry, she's still got nothing. She shrugs helplessly at Samora. 

...Actually, is Samora going to object if she takes that sheet of paper off the clipboard and brings it to the door to see if Kristy, who's just getting back from the clean utility room, has any idea what the heck? 

Oh no, they do have different gods in Arcadia. She's fine with Marian taking it; maybe whoever she shows it to will recognize Pharasma or Abadar or Sarenrae at least. (Also she's kind of glad she didn't put much effort into the Asmodean and Kuthite symbols; she wouldn't want anyone who hasn't looked at her getting confused about which ones she thinks about regularly.)

Marian smiles at her, leaves the clipboard and pencil assembly with her in case she wants to make a second attempt at conveying whatever-it-is, and takes the drawing to the door. 

"Kristy, uh, hey - oh, right, you were going to look at the orders - one sec, can I get you to look at this and say if you have any idea what it means? She spent, like, five minutes drawing it..." 

Kristy frowns at it. "....Huh. I don't know. Maybe it's a personality test thing? My dad really likes this personality test thing that has nine types of people..." 

"The Enneagram? I don't - hmm, maybe -" Marian is going to stare at the paper in renewed concentration. "Ugh. I guess swords and bows could sort of be thematically about Enneagram Type One." However, she has no explanation for why her patient would, with deadly seriousness, try to exchange their Enneagram types. "...I guess you could say Enneagram Threes are party people but I don't think Eights are spider people - actually I don't know if that's how the boxes would be numbered, I've only seen the Enneagram in a circle. I think it's probably not that, sorry..." 

Shrug. "Should I go ask Ameera, she was about to go on break? -" 

This is apparently a fascinating and fun distraction, because within a couple of minutes there are, like, six nurses hanging out in the vicinity of their pod, passing around the sheet of paper. 

"Maybe it's like that meme where you pick your spirit animal -"  

     "Wait, what meme?"

"It's on Tumblr." 

     "I don't think anyone's spirit animal is 'the letter X'..." 

"Uh, is top middle - sorry, the one beside the bird - literally meant to be a clitoris -?" 

....Okay this actually seems like a distraction from Marian's more important priorities, which include finding out from Kristy what new orders she has and whether there's a plan for what to do about the patient's horrifying abdominal ??infection?? 

(The patient seems bizarrely unconcerned about her horrifying abdominal infection! If Marian had goo leaking out of her that smelled like bog death she would be way more concerned about that!)

Dr Harrison wants to send a wound culture and blood cultures from two sites and a repeat blood gas and lactate if that’s not already done, and add vancomycin to her antibiotic cocktail pending the culture results, and get an abdominal CT with contrast. 

And then probably back to the OR tonight? Dr Harrison probably didn't say because he's terrible at communicating his plans ever  it seems like it's pretty obviously indicated. Ugh. 

...The much more immediate ugh is that she has to draw blood - multiple times, they need the arterial sample too and she doesn't have an art line to draw from anymore - and Samora seemed really unhappy about it when she was just using blood already leaking out of her to take a glucose–

–also FUCK she's got to be like ten minutes overdue on taking another blood sugar. 

One of the residents - not the one who was previously freaked out by horrifying wound drainage - comes over with the paper. "I swear this thing is, like, the weirdest version ever of the sandwich meme?"