She wakes up on a flat, grassy plain, not far from a teenage boy who begins speaking to her very rapidly in an oddly musical language. 

What. 

Is that...some sort of conlang? It's very pretty which would be a design criteria but it's totally unfamiliar. 

Also. What. 

She looks around some more. Still no sign at all of the remains of a plane, or anything at all on fire. 

"I'm sorry," she says, trying not to sound as irritable as she feels, "can you please tell me in Baseline what just happened?" 

The boy takes out a piece of paper and starts to draw odd shapes on it.

This is still not helping! Those are not letters Merrin recognizes. Also not a drawing of a plane crashing. 

She sits up and tests her limbs for injury and runs through the last day in her head to check for any memory gaps. Well, other than the OBVIOUS one where she has no idea how she got from a crashing plane to this field. It's very surprising that nothing is on fire. She's pretty sure that planes contain quite a lot of highly flammable fuel. It's more surprising that she's not noticeably injured. 

The boy attaches the talisman to her shoulder and then bows deeply.

"This unworthy one is sorry to have touched you, Mistress Foreigner," he says, very quickly, "and humbly asks if you happen to be a doctor."

He looks very freaked out.

"If you can speak Baseline why didn't you start with– nevermind."

Merrin is noticing some ADDITIONAL confusion. She's trying to very quickly reason through how probable it is that she has a head injury of which the only noticeable symptom is a complete inability to make sense of her situation. And maybe amnesia? Could she have wandered far enough away from the plane crash site and then fallen asleep here and forgotten that? This...does not seem medically plausible. She is, however, running low on alternate explanations. 

"Um, I'm a paramedic so I do have medical training but I am strictly speaking not a doctor - also in case you didn't see it happen, I should disclose that I was in a plane crash and I don't remember how I got from there to here and so it's possible I am not actually in a state where I can safely provide treatment to anyone. Where are we?" Another fragment of her brain catches up. "...Oh! Is there another survivor from the crash? I can come right away, I'm probably not worse than no medical attention even if I may be impaired." 

"Mistress Foreigner, this lowly one is sure that foreign lands have superior talismans but this insignificant land's worthless talismans struggle with unfamiliar vocabulary." He says this so fast that it's all almost like one word. "Zhuren didn't survive a very-large-sword crash, this insignificant land only has swords that fit four or five people at once. He was so busy with work that he did not eat or sleep and his devotion to his great cause surpassed even his incomparable abilities in inedia."

Merrin gets a strong sense that "zhuren" means that the other person owns this boy like he's a table and "inedia" means living without food or sleep or water.

Medical triage, at this point in Merrin's career, is not a process that actually requires having explicit thoughts. Which means that she's already responding to the stranger even as the entire rest of her mind is going into a tailspin and dive at least as dramatic as the literal one she just experienced along with the plane. 

"That does sound concerning. I'll come with you and see what I can do - can you describe his symptoms more while we go?"

She stands up. Her body cooperates without complaint, which doesn't make any sense; if she had a medically-implausible head injury that somehow gave her hours or days of amnesia and not a headache, it would still need to have been long enough for bruises to stop aching, in which case she ought to instead be hungry. Right? That's how biology works? 

....She is fairly sure that 'how biology works' does NOT include people having the mysterious ability to live without food or sleep or water. Although someone thinking they could would explain the ill-advised attempt. Maybe? Sort of? Not really though??? 

What does it even MEAN to own someone like a table she is not going there right now, there is a medical emergency to assess first. 

Why is he calling planes 'swords' not going there either. Medical emergency. Priorities. 

- her attempts to put all non-medical queries on hold stumble when she catches up to processing the bit about the...translation talismans? Is that some kind of Advanced Technology from the sort of science fiction she never reads? 

She is starting to feel intensely uneasy but finishing this line of thought is being bottlenecked on the fact that most of her attention is on listening to the boy's answer to her question. 

"Mistress Foreigner, zhuren's still breathing but shallowly and his qi is flowing but-- not well-- but he's unconscious and he won't wake up when shaken and he's pale and clammy and blood is dripping from his mouth."

Well that is a description that is not reassuring in the slightest! Merrin walks faster. Maybe she should run. Though she has no idea where she's going, so actually she needs to go at the same pace as the boy, but she can try to indicate with body language that she's ready to hurry as much as he wants. 

"I see. Do you know how long he's been, um, trying to go without food or sleep? Were there signs of something wrong before this?"

A corner of her mind is stuck in a quiet strangled loop of CONFUSION and most of her attention is now on making sense of those symptoms, which are also confusing but a much more tractable kind. 

"- Wait, sorry, his what isn't flowing well?" 

"His qi. Um-- Mistress Foreigner if this unintelligent one tells you something important for zhuren's treatment will you swear by the Heavens and your ancestors and the gods of your land not to tell anyone else?"

Oh! Mistress Foreigner wants to run? This boy is happy to run as fast as Mistress Foreigner can keep up with.

She's not going to outright sprint or anything, she wants enough breath to talk, but she's in good shape and can speed up to a jog. 

"- I'm not sure I understand what you're asking me to do - standard medical confidentiality means I won't share anything unless it's with another medical professional and it's actually necessary for his treatment, is that all right?" 

"Oh, no, this humble one begs you not to share it with anyone, Mistress Foreigner, even another doctor. Sect Leader Jiang would be so angry he would probably kill this useless slave!"

They're approaching a camp-- tents, fires, wagons of supplies. Merrin's confusion about the "very large sword" might be deepened by the fact that several people are observably flying while standing on their swords like a skateboard.

"....Um, I - don't think I understand anything about this situation well enough to feel comfortable making any serious promises like this, but I - don't want to make anything worse by intervening, that would also be against medical ethics - and normal ethics - why don't I just come look at him first and if I think he's in critical danger and I can't get him stabilized without knowing the thing I'll say so and otherwise you can tell me later once we have a chance to talk about it more -?" 

There are people. Flying. On swords. Like skateboards. That is not how swords work and also not how gravity works and is possibly even more baffling than the plane-crash memory discontinuity. 

...Merrin is seriously considering the possibility that she's hallucinating, in which case she knows what she's supposed to do, but it's not actually a satisfying explanation, this is very implausibly detailed and coherent and indistinguishable-from-actual-events-actually-happening, and also she is KIND OF BUSY and now is not a good time to pause. She wants to see the patient first and if he's not imminently dying then she can worry about that before actually attempting any treatment (and she should definitely do it then, since it would be fairly irresponsible to carry out any medical treatment when already considering the possibility that she's completely out of touch with reality, but she cannot actually bring herself to stop before she's seen what she's dealing with here -) 

"Yes, that sounds good, Mistress Foreigner."

He directs her to a tent.

Around the vicinity of the tent are several dozen corpses standing up and staring aimlessly into space.

Inside the tent is a seventeen-year-old boy who is, as reported, pale and clammy and breathing shallowly and bleeding slightly from the mouth and extremely unconscious. He has been neatly tucked in. Also inside the tent is a layer of notebooks, random papers, musical instruments, half-eaten food, empty bottles, dirty clothes, pornographic drawings, etc.

Wait WHAT NOW– later. The mysterious corpses are not the patient she's being called in for. 

Merrin dives in, which involves stepping on multiple obstacles, there's not enough clear floor for stepping around to apply but she can at least direct her feet toward notebooks and papers and drawings rather than bottles or food. She squats at his side and checks his pulse. 

"There's food in here," she points out, somewhat inanely. "You think he hasn't been eating much, though?" 

"Zhuren has been practicing inedia for the past ten days. This useless slave had been assigned to other tasks and was shamefully unable to bring him his meals, a failure for which I will undoubtedly be punished greatly. --Zhuren's devotion to his clan is great," the teenager adds, in case there was any confusion about this point.

There is a pulse! Not as much of a pulse as one would ideally hope but, you know, a pulse.

"This humble one fed zhuren qi and made sure he was comfortable and then went to look for a doctor when he didn't wake up," the teenager says, his scripted words not doing a very good job at all of hiding how incredibly freaked out he is. 

"Hey, it's okay. It's not your fault. You're handling this really well," Merrin says, without any particular thought going into the words. She does not reassuringly pat the teenager's shoulder because he seems to have some very weird presumptions around physical touch. "You were entirely right to get a doctor. I don't have any of my supplies on me because of the plane crash, I would normally start with IV fluids and nutrition but given the sense I'm getting of the, um, general tech level around here, I sort of doubt you have that. Do you have oral rehydration solution. ...That's not going to work right now because he needs to be awake to swallow but we can figure something out." 

You know! On reflection! Actually it would be GREAT if this were an implausibly detailed and realistic hallucination! Because the alternative is that she is, apparently, trapped in some kind of bizarre horrible alien civilization with a teenager who seems to be terrified of punishment including literal death for things that are in no way his fault! 

"- Do you have any more blankets," she says in a rote tone, "we should keep him as warm as possible. And then I want you to sit with him and, um, keep...feeding him qi, if it seemed like that was helping, I just - I need to - I'll be right back." Probably. If she's not right back it's because this is not actually real. She doesn't say that. It would not be reassuring. 

"This unintelligent one is ignorant in matters of medicine but I haven't heard of oral rehydration solution. This humble one has a meager medicine kit." The teenage boy somehow manages to quickly find the medicine kit and blankets in this mess of a tent. "Zhuren likes to be warm at night," he explains, and then realizes he gave irrelevant information to the doctor, and then says, "this humble one apologizes for his impertinence."

He sits next to the unconscious boy and holds his hand and sings to him. He has a very pretty voice.

The medicine kit turns out to contain needles, incense, candles, stones, and a whole lot of neatly labeled herbs and oils.

Awwwww. 

"That's okay," she says soothingly. "We can make it, it's literally just water and sugar and salt. ....Clean water. That part's important. If your drinking water here isn't reliably clean then we need to boil it to make sure it's safe." 

Merrin's planned ungraceful escape from the tent is delayed while she inventories the medical kit. It is not helpful. What is she supposed to do with any of this. Maybe the herbs are medicinal? She glares at the labels. 

"Mistress Foreigner, you need... water that non-cultivators won't get sick if they drink?"