"Élie?" Merrin tries again, and smiles warmly at him. "Félix!" she repeats at the bird, and offers more bread, and smiles even though she has no idea if birds, even alien birds that can talk, are capable of parsing human facial expression. (And separately she has no idea if any of this is even real but she's not going to try to solve that mystery right now, she can't even ask questions and also she's busy eating food.) 

She seems friendly. He should stop having this conversation before he gets any more squeamish about doing what needs to be done, if it turns out he actually has to do it. 

He mimes sleeping. It's late. 

Merrin nods. It's not especially late in Merrin's most recent time zone but she can generally sleep on demand, if she really has to, and she's not spectacularly well rested or anything, she had work last night and then had life admin to deal with this morning before getting on a plane for her date (which she was honestly really looking forward to, and is trying not to feel pointlessly upset or about missing.)

Usually she has reasonably comfortable bed-surfaces to sleep on. Are there any visible in the room? 

That depends on how she feels about damp straw. 

That's not a sleeping surface. It doesn't even occur to Merrin that it could possibly be.

(She's slept outdoors, before, not even in a tent just straight-up on the ground in the wilderness - there was a really obscure Exception Handling training involved -  but she had a lightweight sleeping bag with appropriate padding, and also she's probably one of, like, under a thousand people on the entire planet who's ever done that for any reason.) 

Her eyes slide past the damp straw without stopping, and she keeps looking and then gives Élie a confused look, and mimes sleeping again with the same gesture he used, and points questioningly at the door. 

Élie will helpfully pull some damp straw out from between the wine barrels, arrange it into something resembling a pillow, and cover it with his coat. 

Oh. Okay. Sure. 

Merrin smiles at him and gets up and heads over to the damp straw. This is fine. It probably won't even be as uncomfortable as her outdoor sleeping experiences because the mysterious underground tunnel-room has a roof. She's so confused about why these people have access to underground tunnels and not sleeping bags, but the kid is clearly also having an exhausting day and she's not going to try to mime that question at him or convey it via drawing on the floor (she has some pens and graphite-pencils in pockets of her clothing he didn't check) or anything. 

Merrin lies down on the straw. Wow, that sure is damp, ugh. This continues to not be her biggest problem and it would be socially awkward to complain and also how would she even do that, like, licking her hand and pointing at it and pointing at the bed? More awkward. And she's not sleepy exactly but she is tired. 

She closes her eyes and wriggles a bit to get comfortable and then pretends to sleep while she tries to think. 

Élie can also pretend to sleep. He's very good at this. In school, every week, he'd to roll a pair of dice to select a random day and a random time of night and wake up right on cue and spend a whole precious hour thinking his own true thoughts instead of doing everything in his power to suppress them. 

...what are his own true thoughts right now? An hour ago, he didn't want to kill the alien because he thought she was a Chelish spy. Now he doesn't want to kill her because he thinks she isn't. This suggests some underlying, consistent motivation. What is it? He's not inordinately afraid of death, his own or others; he's caused people to die before and will again. Then there's the argument he gave to Jean-Claude and Gabrielle – that they can use the alien's knowledge to help win their war. He believes it, of course, he doesn't lie as a matter of principle. That's closer. But it feels – secondary, somehow. He'd want to spare her, even if there was nothing to be gained. There's something sickening about the idea of stumbling across something some gaping hole in his knowledge of the world and not even trying to know what it might mean. Worse than sickening: it's Chelish. It's the attitude that cowers away from conscious thought, because acknowledging that something might not make sense only leads to fear and pain. He's not in the business of destroying that which he doesn't understand. 

Élie feels better with that out in the open. He wishes he could sleep for real. He hates not getting his spells back. But a promise is a promise, so he starts reviewing Draconic vocabulary in his head and listens to Merrin breathe. 

Merrin tries to think. 

....Doesn't find much traction on making predictions about her experience of tomorrow, wherever she is right now and however she got here. (She spends a little while considering much weirder possible hypotheses, now that she has space for it, and then decides that this is actually kind of unpleasant and she's already dealing with enough unpleasantness just with the whole damp straw bed.)

Mostly she ends up going over the various petty emotions that she didn't have time to finish feeling before the plane crash that killed her  should have killed her she's not even going to bother figuring out the right nomenclature there. She's stupidly frustrated that she missed her date. She's weirdly upset that her parents and friends and boyfriends are going to, presumably, believe that she's dead as in destroyed forever, and be upset about that? Which feels like too much power to have over the world, somehow, even though that's stupid. 

After a while spent chewing on that, Merrin falls asleep for real, damp straw or not. 

It is MORNING and Élie is GRUMPY. Are the birds singing? They'd better cut that the fuck out. 

Once asleep, Merrin has trained herself to only wake up to a range of specific emergency-response alerts, medical alarms, or someone calling her name in a very particular urgent tone of voice. She is comfy in her damp straw and there are no emergency-response alerts or medical alarms going off. There may or may not be birds singing but, unless they manage to sound exactly like a particular alarm or response-alert, Merrin is not going to care. She's really good at sleeping for six to eight hours once she's fallen asleep in a place without a particular deadline. 

(...She has not specifically trained the habit of waking up to someone saying her name in a mildly irritated tone of voice, but Élie does know her name, and if he says it in a tone that indicates even minor annoyance, then she's quite likely to wake up to it anyway.) 

Does Élie look like he's in the mood to interact with people right now? It's a little bit after dawn; he's going to wait until Jean-Claude is back with Share Languages and, much more importantly, coffee. 

Merrin wakes up to Jean-Claude's arrival. She sneezes and blinks straw-dust out of her eyes and is briefly so confused about where she is and then remembers and almost starts crying. 

Instead of crying, she sits up. She's alive. She's also - still - in the most confusing place imaginable and it might be literally another planet and as many as several other things do not make any sense. And it's starting to seem really implausible, at this point, that it's either a psychotic break or a weird training scenario.

But she's alive, which is better than she had any right to expect really, and maybe today she'll get some answers? 

Jean-Claude leans over and touches her on the forehead. A moment later, Élie says, "Good morning, Merrin. I apologize for the welcome – I'd like to be a good host, but this week we seem to be having a revolution." 

Merrin immediately notices several things, which are that: 

1) That is not Baseline. It's hard to tell for sure with the amount of language exposure she actually had yesterday, but from the phoneme patterns she thinks it's probably what they were speaking yesterday. 

2) She did not understand it yesterday. 

3) She understands it now.

...Can she answer in the same language? If she can then she has even less idea what could possibly be going on here! 

ALSO she has apparently landed on a planet that is ACTUALLY TRYING TO OVERTHROW ITS GOVERNMENT and while she sure is even more prepared for this eventuality than average, she would really like to have more context on why!  

"That's understandable," she tries to say. Whoa. Weird. "I - oh is that why you were alarmed when I arrived suddenly, did you think I was... Anyway I want to offer to help but I think I mostly have questions right now and the first one is how am I speaking this language." 

The first thing Élie thinks is that Merrin is the sort of person who hears someone's in the middle of revolting and immediately offers to help with no additional context or explanation, which if true speaks well of her moral character and if false at least suggests she isn't a Chelish agent. It's not the kind of lie he thinks they're capable of. Not definitive, but evidence. 

"Jean-Claude used the spell Share Language to give you knowledge of Taldane. He's a cleric of Phleygas, one of our minor gods." Oh, but her world might not have divine  spellcasters – "I don't know how magic works on your planet. Here on Golarion, gods sometimes give their followers spells to cast. They have to pray for the spells they want at the beginning of every day instead of preparing them as wizards would, which is why we couldn't just do it yesterday. We'll have to repeat it tomorrow, it only lasts for a day."  

What. What. 

This doesn't seem like the sort of thing that can happen! Though dying in a plane crash and waking up on another planet is ALREADY not the sort of thing that can happen and Merrin is not sure that the other planet also being a fantasy setting is genuinely any more surprising? 

It does explain a few niggling points of confusion. Mainly by shifting her confusion to totally different places! 

She is suddenly wishing she'd read more fiction about government-overthrowing in fantasy settings specifically, except that this would have been a ridiculous thing to prioritize given the information she had before yesterday. 

Élie is giving her a look that seems - wary, still, but surprised and maybe tentatively relieved, even pleased. 

They have MAGIC. Merrin's emotions are starting to properly freak out about this, trying to guess all the implications even though she knows exactly one fact about what the magic can do. Actually, no, two things: she also learned you can get it either by 'preparing' it individually, as 'wizards' do, or praying to a 'god'. What the flaming toilet paper is a 'god'. The translation magic seems to be trying to give her hints, but apparently 'god' just - doesn't map neatly to anything in Baseline. 

Merrin takes a deep breath. 

"...Right. We don't have magic at all so I guess that's going to take me some getting used to. And probably has a lot of impact on what exactly your problems are with trying to overthrow your government? - What's going on with your government, anyway, when did you decided they needed overthrowing and why?" 

"I – huh. That's very surprising! My understanding is that magic as practiced by mortals depends on properties that should be constant anywhere on the material plane, even if different spellcasters access it in different ways. Almost every culture on Golarion's managed to discover it independently, so one would really think aliens would as well. I suppose your planet might be on another plane altogether, which would also explain why you don't have afterlives or don't think you have afterlives, but would make it much more confusing how you managed to get here – "

– and none of that answers her actual question, does it, Élie – 

"Personally, I decided our government needed overthrowing when I was eleven. We had a famine in Isarn that year – that's the city we're in – and my father works as an accountant for a shipping concern, and they weren't allowed to purchase more grain than they would ordinarily, because that would suggest there was a shortage, which would mean that the governor had failed to anticipate the bad harvest, and she's a cousin of the king, and it just seemed that there had to be a better way of doing things. – That's not the real problem, of course. The real problem is that our king is a servant of the god Asmodeus, who desires that all mortal beings serve him in life and be tortured in Hell eternally after death. So that's their major policy priority. We're against it."  

Merrin listens intently. Looks confused and curious when he gets to 'afterlives' bit, but doesn't interrupt. 

Her expression when he reaches 'they weren't allowed to purchase more grain than they would ordinarily, because that would suggest there was a shortage', though, is one of utter and absolute baffled horror. By the time he gets to 'the god Asmodeus, who desires that all mortal beings serve him in life and be tortured in Hell eternally after death' she is half reeling and half numb and not really able to respond to that. 

She's trying to formulate an answer but what are you even supposed to SAY to that. 

"I'm sorry. I know that must not make much sense without context. Would you like me to explain how our afterlives work, or perhaps more about our gods?" 

What Merrin really wants is to demand an explanation for how a government could possibly end up in a stable equilibrium where the decision-makers would try to conceal a shortage by refusing to fix it, she doesn't begin to understand the train of events that would have to go wrong in order to end up there. And she has some additional questions about why - this kid looks maybe sixteen - why no one overthrew the government FIVE YEARS AGO. And she's more quietly confused but possibly even more disconcerted at the way he said it, the little half-shrug and "that's not the real problem" how could it POSSIBLY not be the real problem - 

Gods. Afterlives. Right. Maybe something in there explains the scale of incredibly obvious disaster here. Though Merrin can't think what that would possibly be. She is so so prepared for so many kinds of bizarre emergency but an entire government inexplicably failing at extremely basic economics in front of all the starving people is not one she knows how to respond to at all. 

"Yes, please, tell me about 'afterlives' and 'gods'." Her voice is shaking slightly. 

"There are two axes along which divine beings and such are organized – Law and Chaos, Good and Evil. One can also be Neutral on either; we've got nine afterlife planes, one for each possible combination. Those planes are also where gods and lesser entities of the same type usually live. They're much bigger, much more powerful than humans, they can manipulate the stuff of reality directly in ways we only approximate with magic. When mortals die, the True Neutral goddess Pharasma decides which combination of alignments their actions in life most embodied and sends them to the appropriate afterlife. Ultimately, those mortal souls become more like Outsiders – the things that originated from that plane and most purely reflect its characteristics. 

This nation, Cheliax, belongs to Asmodeus, the Lawful Evil god of tyranny and slavery and man's inhumanity to man pretty generally. It's unusual for countries to directly belong to a god, most of them aren't that invested in the material plane, but it's just our luck that He is. Mostly he leaves us to the king so he can concentrate on ruling Hell, the Lawful Evil afterlife. The people who go there are tortured forever. ...In the interests of fairness I should say that his Church claims that at least some of them eventually become devils themselves and go on to torture others, but we have only their word for it, and Asmodeus is also the god of lies.

The Gods sometimes choose to grant their worshippers on the material plane the ability to cast spells. It mostly works like ordinary magic, except that it depends on wisdom instead of intelligence. Gods grant some spells that wizards can't cast, and don't grant others which wizards can. Healing magic is almost all divine – that's how I figured out your planet doesn't have divine magic, actually, your medical books would have mentioned it. 

There's a lot more, but I hope that makes the situation at bit clearer." 

The gods sound like...aliens? Really powerful aliens, with - some kind of technology, or, well, magic, fantasy setting and all - it's not actually matching up to a recognizable trope in any fiction she's read but then again it's not clear that she should be expecting it to. Though she wishes she had more to go on in terms of making guesses about what might happen in the future. Not being able to make any guesses about the future is not actually much less terrifying for a trained Exception Handler. It might be more terrifying; she's used to operating in domains that she understands. 

- ignore that. Mental note, still confused about gods. Keep listening, he's not exactly waiting for her to finish her thoughts here. 

Afterlives. The conceptualmagic language-translation seems to be trying its best to convey context, but it's not quite enough to confirm that he doesn't just mean...whatever happened to her when the plane crashed. Though certainly she wasn't expecting that, and it seems like he wasn't expecting that either, and it's awfully fraught to be gleaning subtext from a conversation using translation-magic with someone from another world which is a fantasy setting, but she's pretty sure he's - alive. (That he was scared she would hurt him, yesterday - maybe scared she would kill him, if she'd in fact been - whoever or whatever he thought she was, the obvious guess being a representative of the Governance he's trying to overthrow - aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahokay not thinking about that now–) 

There are some words in there that her mind is telling her that she recognizes and understands, except they're - not actually hooked up to concepts that make very much sense in this context. 'Law' is....something something Coordination, except she can tell he doesn't mean that Baseline word, that 'Law' is both missing components and pulling in other things...? Chaos is - oh that's interesting, actually, there's no Baseline word for the thing it is, there's not really even a single concept, it's branching into 'mess' and 'entropy' and...'cognitive diversity' -? But she doesn't see how or why it could possibly make sense to draw boundaries in reality that way, and there's no time to think about it now, so, mental note. Good and Evil - seem more like they just make sense, but she's really suspicious of that, now. Mental note. 

- right, focus, he's talking about something else now. Countries. Cheliax. She recognizes the sounds, it's the place he asked yesterday if she had heard of, after doing magic to her that felt like something and was probably communication-related but isn't what he did to her today to let her understand him. Anyway. Knowing for sure that it's a country and not a person or an object or a field of math or something, she still hasn't heard of it but now she knows it's the Governance of Cheliax that he's overthrowing. Because....apparently there's more than one Governance? In Golarion? Huh. Seems weird but Merrin hasn't read enough alternatesociety fiction to know if that's actually weird. 

What does it even mean for a place-where-dead-people-keep-existing and a powerful-superhuman-fantasy-alien to be working toward Coordination and also defecting-on-purpose-to-hurt-people, which is what she's glossing Evil as for right now. Those do not seem like concepts that should really be compatible! What!?

- yeah okay she's going to make a mental note about the 'tortured forever', note the part about 'Asmodeus is the god of lies' and update that 'Law' is not translating right and she needs to clarify what the flaming poop it actually means using simple words, and then stop thinking about that until it's fine if she cries. She's not going to cry in front of the kid. He's already trying to overthrow Governance, he doesn't need more emotional stress in his life. 

Powerful superhuman magical aliens can delegate magical abilities to humans. Seems reasonable. The particular magic they convey can do Healing that's incredible except much less so because some of the 'gods' like to torture people and lie about it and then call it Coordination! For some reason! (- mental note-to-self she's being indignant at the cost of checking all her thoughts for accuracy, she already concluded that 'Law' doesn't mean that.) 

Well. 

"....That was very informative but not really in a way where it made the situation clearer," Merrin admits. "I have a lot of questions. Is there any chance you have something to write on and something to write with so I can make a list of my questions and not lose track? I don't want to use any of my own stuff unless it's critical, I don't think I can get more of it now."