"I really don't think we need you to be casting Stabilize every six seconds! He's fine! ...I mean, I think it's a good idea to have one of either you or Shavri here all the time, because if I notice anything that even might be wrong I can tell you to start casting Stabilize every six seconds just in case. But I really think we've got this and we know what's wrong with him and it's not getting worse fast." 

....Fine. It's a pretty good point that Leareth is the most stable right now that he's going to be until the next Restoration is available, and Shavri had better be in good enough shape to watch over him for the last few hours of the night, not the first few. She can be persuaded to leave the room, eat food, and go lie down in the on-call room, where she expects to lie awake worrying and instead is asleep within less than thirty seconds. 

It's 6:45 pm. They should do some more labs and if nothing is unexpectedly worse they can start decreasing sedation. 

...Okay, none of that is surprising. Some numbers are a little better! Some are a little worse - blood counts, it looks like, his bone marrow is not continuing to recover - but not, like, catastrophically worse. At this rate of decline they should be okay through the morning. Probably. In any case they should definitely be okay through the next two hours. 

"Dr Harrison, are we ready to start weaning the sedation?" 

"Yeah, let's go for it. Take it slow." 

...That's not a very specific instruction but Marian is capable of using some of her own judgement. She confirms that Leareth is still not even slightly reacting to a painful stimulus, then eases the rate down to 45 mcg/kg/min, which is still insanely high, and settles in to stare at him for the next ten minutes until it makes sense to repeat the neuro assessment. Man, things are really going better, at some point this jumped straight from 'overwhelmingly heavy patient with zero time to think' to 'mostly standing around observing and waiting.' 

She smiles at Samora, to try to convey that now would not be a terrible time for conversation, but she cannot herself think of any conversation topics she wants to delve into. 

"Did I ever explain to you how alignments and the afterlives work? Also, did anyone figure out whether I ought to leave the country soon or can stay for a while to learn things?"

Oh god right that thing. Ugh. 

“…I don’t think we figured out an exact answer on your legal status here or how to address it, because everyone’s been really distracted," and nobody wanted it to be their problem or sign up to do extra frustrating bureaucracy or phone calls, "but it’s not like you entered the country illegally on purpose - I don’t know, I think there probably just - isn’t really a clear policy on your situation - we should try to figure something out, since we’ve got three people from other worlds here now, but I don't think it's an emergency."

They are drawing more attention to themselves, what with the radiation medicine expert FLYING HERE FROM TENNESSEE, but...probably...the radiation medicine expert will not report their magic healer to ICE? ...Honestly she's a little worried that Dr Harrison is bending the rules enough that Dr Chen might decide to report it to, like, the medical board, but probably she wouldn't try to screw over Samora on purpose? Surely nobody who's met Samora for more than three minutes is going to want to do that.

Maybe the hospital social worker knows things? Including if the answer is 'no absolutely do not try to go through any formal immigration channels that's insane'; they do get actual illegal immigrants as patients and Marian thinks she would have heard if this resulted in them getting deported. It'll have to be tomorrow, though, because all of sudden it’s past business hours. 

"- Anyway, sure, this is a pretty good time to explain more about alignment and afterlives? If we got into it at all before I didn't, like, take notes." And it was almost twelve hours ago and has since then been entirely replaced in Marian's brain by 5823834524 lab results. 

"Alright! Alignment is a pair of axes, the Good/Evil axis and the Law/Chaos axis. It's possible to be any of Good, Neutral, or Evil and any of Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic, independently of each other. People and gods and outsiders and some spells all have alignments. Humans all start out Neutral and acquire alignments based on their actions. Actions that help other people and make the world a better place are Good; actions that hurt people and make the world worse are Evil. Keeping your commitments and obeying the law and having predictable consistent policies is Lawful; breaking promises and neglecting your duty and freedom and deciding what to do about things case by case are Chaotic."

"When people die, they go to a trial where it's determined what alignment they are; lawyers from the different planes argue that the dead person is that plane's alignment and a judge decides. Then the dead person goes to the plane associated with their alignment, which pushes them further in the direction of that alignment until they turn into outsiders. Lawful Good people go to Heaven, which is a paradise of peace and prosperity, or you can join the army of Heaven and fight to liberate Hell. Nirvana is a paradise where everyone turns into animals and gets shapeshifting; they focus on saving people from the Evil afterlives by sending someone to every trial even if it's hopeless. Elysium is the Chaotic Good paradise of endless beautiful wilderness; they do all sorts of different things. Axis is the Lawful Neutral City of Cities, you can buy anything there. The Boneyard is the True Neutral plane; it has the judges but is otherwise boring and sends people to anywhere else as soon as they develop an alignment. The Maelstrom is the Chaotic Neutral plane of constant change and inconsistency and I don't understand how anyone does anything there but I've heard they do. And then all the Evil afterlives are horrible and either torture people or eat their souls."

"Heaven and Elysium have their disagreements but a lot of shared goals and can cooperate even though their methods get in each other's way sometimes. Heaven and Hell are at war but can work together on things like preventing the universe from being destroyed. All the other pairs of corners just hate each other and fight."

Marian listens intently and takes diligent notes on the backside of one of the various ECMO-related cheat sheets that they happen to have printed out and in the room. ...In English, so she can share them. She writes down the proper-noun names for each plane phonetically, as best she can, and then labels them as the appropriate alignment and adds a description. It feels like her making-assumptions understanding of the afterlives wasn't wildly off, at least? 

She doesn't run into any questions until the end. "...Wait, I think I'm not picturing this right. If they're all different planes," she's translating this to English as something like 'alternate dimensions', "they're not - touching like countries that share borders - are they somehow like countries with borders? How does it actually work that they fight? I guess you did make it sound like there's magic to travel between planes but not like it's easy -?" 

"Yes, they're all on different planes you need magic to get between, but the outer planes have a lot more magic available than the Prime Material where we are now. Even celestial eagles, which are basically just birds from the upper planes, have a bit of magic, and most humans on Golarion don't have any. So Heaven can invade Hell with more Plane Shifts than mortal armies have access to. And then all the outer planes refrain from doing as much as they can on the Material because if one of them escalated all the others would and it'd just fry everything. Except the Abyss, which is trying to fry everything but mostly each other so they haven't managed it yet."

"Wow, that sounds - really complicated." 

Marian writes it down, and then it's been ten minutes ish and it's time to check on Leareth. 

He’s still on 45 mcg/kg/min of propofol. There is not really much noticeable difference.

That’s pretty unsurprising and Marian would honestly find it mildly alarming if he were waking up already; patients who can fight sedation that hard are stressful.

“And there are multiple gods of the relevant alignment in each afterlife?” she asks. “I remember when you were trying to communicate before, when you couldn’t talk, and you drew us the grid with all the symbols?”

"Yes, I was trying to ask what alignment you were and hoping there were enough gods active on both my planet and yours that you'd be able to recognize some of them and figure out the grid. Complete lost cause, as it turned out, but some Evil people are commendably honest about it, so if you had recognized it it would have been useful."

"It sounds like it made a lot of sense for you to try it!" 

One of Marian's phone alarms goes off to reminder that it's time for mooooore antibioooootics and she deals with that while mulling over Samora's explanation. 

"...Do you figure people from our planet - go - to the same afterlives?" she asks. "I - to be honest I didn't think afterlives were - real. Or gods, or magic. But it seems like it'd be kind of weird for afterlives to exist only for some planets." 

"I've always heard that people from all planets go to the same afterlives, but the only way to be sure would be to scry someone dead, and I'm not strong enough to cast Scrying."

Nod. This seems like a really really incredibly important question, and also every thought Marian tries to have about it seems to instead fall sideways into fretting about one of Leareth's lab results or whether it was a bad idea to stop dialysis or whether he's going to turn out to have some specific neurological deficit that prevents him from doing portals. Possibly this is just...not a topic where she can have useful thoughts while she's still on-shift. 

It's too soon to chart urine output for the next hour but she eyeballs the difference from fifteen minutes ago anyway. It's still like fifteen ccs, he's going to be fine on the hourly total again, but it's kind of a nasty color, and cloudy. What if he gets a UTI. Probably it just looks nasty because of all the muscle-breakdown junk his kidneys are trying to filter out, but maybe she should check anyway... 

At the next neuro check, Leareth still isn't opening his eyes, but he tenses up and makes a distressed facial expression when Marian sternum-rubs him. 

"Sorry," Marian says, even though this is unusually pointless because even if he were awake enough to parse language - and she does not think he's awake enough for that - he still wouldn't understand English. She decrements the propofol rate down to 35 mcg/kg/min.

Ugh was that decerebrate posturing or just him not being awake enough to do anything other than get weirdly tense for a moment. It's honestly way too early to tell, on this much sedation, and also Shavri and the neurologist thought he would wake up, but she's going to be fucking stressing out about it for the next while anyway. 

She manages to slightly soothe her brain by checking his peripheral circulation again and confirming that his extremities are still nice and pink and well perfused and his capillary refill isn't delayed at all. ...Maybe she'll explain what she's checking to Samora, in case it's interesting or useful in any way and also because in Samora's position she would be bored. And then she can explain decerebrate and decorticate posturing as signs of severe brain damage (she makes sure to clarify that they don't think Leareth has severe brain damage!)

That is interesting! Samora has never heard of anyone who got knocked out and woke up with their brain all wrong, except for the thing where being brought back from the dead leaves you feeling like crap, so if it's common on Earth probably cure spells fix it. Samora cannot, she hastens to clarify, raise the dead. If she could she would have mentioned that immediately.

She hasn't been bored, though, because she's been thinking about ways to get evidence on the question of whether dead earth people go to the same afterlives with the resources she has. She could try summoning an angel and asking them if they've ever heard of this planet, which would be definitive if the answer was yes, but any given angel could easily have not met anyone from Earth or heard enough about it to match a description. If Leareth turns out to be cooperative they could try making a portal to Heaven or Axis, both to ask around and because if they're reachable by portal they're probably reachable by dead souls. Marian could tell her a lot of information about some specific dead person and Samora could try to become familiar enough with them to Sending them asking them to describe their situation, which would use the same circle of spell as Restoration but seems the most likely to be definitive either way.

"- Oh, yeah, it's very common here if someone has a bad head injury. Or if their heart stops for a long time and their brain isn't getting blood and a lot of the cells die. We've gotten pretty good at keeping people alive after severe injuries like that. And there's a lot we can do to help, but - if part of their brain is already dead, we can't make it grow back, so, yeah, a lot of people leave this unit not really - like themselves from before. ...I think the Cures did get the really severe damage in Leareth's case, and whatever's left is something else but we think it won't stop him from waking up and understanding language and stuff."

...Marian is not sure she actually knows any specific dead people well enough?? Nearly all of the dead people she ""knows"" are people who died as her patients and she'd met them, like, that day, and usually not while they were conscious; the only dead relative who she even conceivably knew at all well as a person is her paternal grandfather. "What would it take to be enough information? I'm assuming it's more than, like, their name and what they died of. I'm sure someone here would have someone they know that well..." 

Aaaand neuro check time!

This time there's a pretty stark difference! Leareth still doesn't move or open his eyes when she says his name loudly (she hopes she's pronouncing it right, she's only heard it from Shavri in Mindspeech and that's somehow harder to remember), but when she sternum-rubs him again, his eyes fly open and he tries - not at all successfully, but clearly purposefully - to get his arms up in front of his body and block her. 

...He stops moving and relaxes back into sedated sleep about three seconds after she backs off. 

All of which is a really good sign but it was still surprisingly startling! 

"Well, he's definitely going to wake up," she says to Samora. "I...think I need to be more careful to make sure I don't get punched out, though."

She switches to English. "Dr Harrison, should we pause there a while or keep going?"