Okay what? 

Shit. 

Julien Camille Élie Cotonnet is in the catacombs, more than 300 feet underground, which means the unknown wizard – and anyone who suddenly appears in a locked room is almost certainly a wizard – must at the very least be fourth circle and capable of casting Dimension Door. It could be one of their own, as of course neither he nor anyone else knows the faces of revolutionaries outside their own cell, and powerful casters habitually go around disguised. But if she's a fellow rebel, and cleared to know about this place, she'd know the passcode. More to the point, she'd know the consequences for not giving the passcode. A government spy, then. This should really be a hopeless fight – not that it matters just now – but she looks off-balance, maybe even injured. Quick, before she recovers – 

(Ten seconds after she lands, Merrin is tackled by a teenage boy. What he lacks in muscle mass, he more than makes up for in sheer, desperate terror.) 

Merrin does not move or particularly look around in the first ten seconds, after verifying that she is at least not currently on a crashed plane which is on fire. Her surroundings make way less sense than that and she's not in an ideal emotional state for responding to this and is trying to collect herself a bit before doing anything. 

She is very startled about being tackled!

Merrin has self-defense training which actually goes well past the basics, including some training on how to defend herself and immobilize someone when she doesn't want to hurt them. (Dath ilanis experience psychotic breaks sometimes, and they're not usually violent but they sometimes are, and as an EMT this comes up.) She instinctively starts trying to get in a position where she can throw the kid off her - 

- at which point the completely obvious falls into place, which is that a pretty good explanation for the whole 'plane crash, experiencing dying, and then inexplicably waking up in a place that looks kind of underground' could be that she is herself experiencing a psychotic break. And was probably - about to do something extremely concerning that would harm herself or others? In which case she should absolutely not fight back. 

From Élie's perspective, the young woman in incredibly strange and very high-quality-looking clothes spends about two seconds resisting, pretty effectively - she would likely have a good chance of throwing him off given time - and then instead goes completely limp. 

"Tsi-imbi!" she manages to yelp another few seconds after that. 

That's weird behavior for a government spy, some part of his brain reports, while the rest of him fashions a makeshift gag out of a cravat and ties her hands and runs through all the languages he knows and tries to remember if tsi-imbi means anything in any of them. 

The fact that her clothes look strange doesn't surprise him, who knows what they give to agents in Egorian, but the fact that they're not magical very much does. Stranger still, she doesn't seem to be carrying any magic items at all – or rather, she isn't carrying anything that registers as magical to Detect Magic. A spy would have good reason to conceal the auras. But then why wear something so obviously out of the ordinary? What else does she have with her? 

That's not very professional of him but Merrin is probably insane right now so she doesn't resist! 

She has a lot of pockets on her jacket and her pants, many of which have objects in them. They're fastened shut in a way that doesn't show up to Detect Magic but also doesn't give any visible material hints to how it works. She's wearing a slim, lightweight satchel with a strap that goes over her shoulder; the material is soft and apparently conforms exactly to the shape of her body. The satchel doesn't appear to have much in it, but the method of opening or closing it is equally mysterious. 

He has a knife. If that doesn't work, Open is a cantrip. 

The knife does not work.

The cantrip does! The flap on the bag pops open. It's...still completely unclear what was holding it shut in the first place. 

Inside, it has a number of cleverly arranged pouches and pockets for keeping objects of various sizes and shapes neatly organized. There's a comb and a little tube of something (it's scented lip balm) and a clear flexible little pouch holding several stiff rectangles of something that isn't paper or metal or wood, with designs on them and what's probably writing except it's not a script he's ever seen or heard of.

The rest is...actually it looks like it might be first-aid related? There are recognizable bandages of several sizes, sealed in clear wrapping, and a clear flat box full of a neat row of tubes with creams in them and tiny bottles and vials of liquid, and there are more items that make even less sense at a first glance but are arranged near those ones. 

Merrin continues not to resist but is increasingly confused. Her initial read of the situation is making less sense, now. 

Well, Élie didn't think he was going to need Comprehend Languages today. Fortunately, he's in the habit of leaving spell slots open. He pulls a heavy book out of thin air and starts studying it intently; it'll take about fifteen minutes. 

Merrin, who is physically unable to interrupt or try further communication, watches him. Tries to gauge how hard it would be to get loose of the binding on her wrists without actually moving; she judges it as probably doable, this kid is clearly not trained in the most effective techniques for tying people up and a couple of her boyfriends are, plus there was that one time in the Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival where she got captured by aliens and tied up and had to escape. 

She does not attempt this; the teenager looks incredibly stressed and - scared? - and certainly jumpy and he has a KNIFE. Which would be mostly nonworrying if anything else about this situation made sense, but in fact, it doesn't. 

Maybe she's just straightforwardly hallucinating? It wouldn't be the least plausible hallucination scenario for someone having a psychotic break who also has Merrin's life experience? Except that in her medical experience, generally that degree of actual immersive fully-realstic-seeming hallucination is, one, really extremely rare to the point of mostly not being a thing. And two, would almost always be seen with much worse cognitive disturbance than she's noticing. Her metacognition could be impaired, of course, but she's sitting here - lying here - having thoughts that logically follow from each other, and she's entirely able to notice that the discontinuity between the plane crash and...this...makes no flaming sense, as opposed to having dream-logic about it. 

Hopefully at some point this teenager who is inexplicably panicked about her presence will calm down and finish whatever he's doing and explain??

This teenager realizes in the middle of preparing his spell that he's acting like an absolute godsdamn lunatic. 

What is it he's hoping to find? Proof that this mysterious woman isn't from the secret police. Why does it matter? It really, profoundly does not – she teleported into a secret rebel hideout harboring a wanted fugitive. If she's the enemy, he's lost the moment he lets her open her mouth. There's no information he could find that should convince him it's safe to do so. What he needs to do – what he needs to have done in the first place, before giving her time to plan – is slit her throat and let Pharasma sort her out. 

– and she might even be innocent. He could live with that. But in the much more likely event that she's guilty, he would have with his own hands condemned a soul to Hell. 

That shouldn't give him pause. He did his best to start the riot two days ago; now there are hundreds dead and most of those are damned. He knew the costs and did it anyway, he can't bring himself to regret it, he's an awful hypocrite and he'd even say he deserves his inevitable malediction, if any living being could. ....but he's not going to kill her. Given that he's not going to kill her, he needs to make a genuine effort to figure out what's actually going on. If she's a fourth-circle wizard, she could have easily overpowered him – the fact that she didn't try suggests her resources might be more limited. How can he tell? If Lucien were here, he might try reading her aura, but Élie has no way of contacting him and no idea if he's even still alive. No use dwelling on that. Next. He's deliberately avoided studying enchantment, and even if he had, he'd be useless against a more powerful caster – but that suggests an obvious test. 

"I'm sorry," he says in a language unlike anything Merrin's ever heard. "I should really have tried this much earlier. Blame a lifetime spent trying very hard never to think of my own motivations. Color Spray." 

Now the bound and gagged woman on the floor is also unconscious! 

Is she faking? Looks like no. That answers one of his questions; a caster more powerful than himself would have shrugged it off. This situation just got enormously more confusing, but hopefully slightly less deadly! 

When Merrin comes to and recovers her vision, the boy is eagerly reading one of her rectangles of ambiguous material. She's still bound, but no longer gagged.  

One of them is just a piece of flat (and nearly indestructible) plastic and it's an ID card! Not all dath ilanis carry something like this on them at all times, but Merrin is often in situations where there might not be Internet access (or electricity) and where it's important to confirm her identity and qualifications.

The card informs Élie that this woman is named Merrin (followed by a unique identification number), that her parents are Elshorm and Salthin, she lives in a place called Default at [some sort of complicated specification with several different numbers in it, maybe her address?], here are a few even more inscrutable ways of contacting her, here is - something? - that is in some way related to her or a specification of something owned by her? (Comprehend Languages is trying to translate the term of a 'website url' but this is an even bigger conceptual gap than email addresses.) 

She reports directly to this person at the Department of Exception Handling, sub-department: medical response in large-scale disasters. She is a fully qualified emergency medical technician. Here are a list of all her additional special qualifications in Exception Handling. There are, like, eight of them. They take up the entirety of the text box for that. She is certified to work with the - some kind of military body? - and she is certified to respond to emergencies expected to last more than eight hours and she is certified to respond to emergencies where she will not have access to expert backup or something called 'prediction markets'. She's trained to use 'military power armor'. There are some other pieces of information on the very very information-dense card which are even harder to make any sense of. 

The second rectangle is slightly thicker and heavier, though still very lightweight. It's a power-efficient e-reader. It's currently loaded with a flashcard app; with trial and error, Élie can probably figure out the tapping motion that flips between question and answer, and the sort of sliding motion that flicks it to the next card, and the different tapping motion that would theoretically open up the 'further information' page but is currently instead displaying that there is NO SIGNAL DETECTED.

The questions are all about medical treatment. Other than that, the content is totally unfamiliar and technical and hard to follow. 

Merrin wakes up. 

...What just happened?? She definitely lost consciousness for a bit there! She's not really sure why! She didn't think he administered any drugs to her - if it were a gas she would likely have smelled something and it wouldn't have been instantaneous and it should have gotten him as well...

At this point, most dath ilani would be terrified and panicking. Merrin isn't not scared, but she's been in situations that were scarier than this, even if most of them weren't real per se. She turns her head, sees what the kid is doing, and then tries to squirm and make a noise to convey that she's now awake. 

Well that raises a lot more questions! The first of which, stupidly, is what kinds of disasters this person would expect to be involved in that typically get resolved in less than eight hours. Élie's never heard of a place called Default and suspects that it isn't on Golarion. It could be some sort of complicated government deception, but it's not the sort of thing he expects them to come up with –  someone at some point would have had to have had an original thought and that's hardly the sort of thing they encourage. One of the outlying regions of Axis, maybe? That would explain the strange technology and frankly terrifying amount of bureaucracy implied by her identification document; on the other hand, the dead don't typically have militaries or require physicians, and this woman clearly isn't a petitioner. Another planet? He knows some of them are inhabited, and that they might have less access to divine magic, which would explain having a certifying body for non-magical medical professionals but not how she got here in the first place – 

Oh, she's awake. (She'll notice she's no longer gagged). He holds the larger rectangle up so she can see it, tapping on words as he finds them. "Why – are – you – here?" 

Merrin is so confused about his method of communication! This seems so unnecessarily roundabout.

Also she doesn’t have anything for him! She was on a plane and now she’s here and she didn’t do this on purpose and has no explanation for how it happened.

She swallows. “I - sorry - I don’t actually know how I got here, I’d been guessing I was probably hallucinating. The last thing I remember before this is being on a plane that was about to crash, but I - wasn’t expecting to still exist after that, so something outside my model is happening. Um, what did you observe happen?” 

She was on a – flying machine? – he can figure out what those are later – and she was expecting to cease to exist? That's at least slight evidence towards her being some kind of outsider and Default being a region of probably–Axis, outsiders cease to exist when destroyed. Maybe her people are just really into medical roleplay? Whatever. This stupid flat book doesn't have enough words in it and the ones it does have are all things like "subdural hematoma."

"You – acutely – appear. What – etiology? What – location – Default?"

....Seriously, though, why is he attempting to communicate with her via pointing at words in her medical flashcards, when he seems to be able to read those words and understand her spoken answers just fine? Merrin's first stupid thought is 'he's worried about some variant on Keeper talk control' but she's not actually sure that the weird circumlocution thing he's doing would help and also why would he be worried about this especially from her specifically. He read her identification card. She's clearly not a Keeper. 

Her second slightly-less-stupid guess is that he's doing some kind of training scenario or maybe she's ended up in an incredibly weird subvariant of the Annual Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival, but the problem there is that you could explain almost arbitrary weird observations with 'maybe it's a weird training scenario.' 

"I appeared suddenly? That - um - I guess makes as much sense as anything else." He doesn't know where Default is? That's even weirder. Default is Default because it's the city everyone knows about. That's practically what the name means. She can give him a description of what continent it's on and what other commonly-known landmarks are various distances from it? 

He grabs some ink and paper and sketches out a rough world map. "Here." And then, out loud – "Golarion." Back to tapping – "Know – this – location?"

Merrin twists slightly on the floor to get a better viewing angle. Squints at his map. It doesn't look right? It's - not instantly obvious that it's not-right enough to be sure it's not the continents she knows shown in some obscure map-projection style, given the hasty quality of his sketching (and the fact that a lot of people Merrin knows are really not very good at drawing), but - no, what's that enormous lake or inland sea doing in the middle of that continent, that doesn't belong there. And the other two continents tied together by a narrow isthmus and running north-south aren't shaped right at all, and there's also maybe an entire additional landmass? 

"- That's not dath ilan," she says. "Did I somehow end up on another planet because I have no idea for how that could happen!" 

(Hypothesis that this is an obscure variant on an alien-invasion rehearsal except instead, presumably, a version where the aliens kidnapped her: not entirely ruled out? It wouldn't explain the flaming plane crash but it's not completely unimaginable that she could have consented in advance to get memory-altering drugs, which do exist - drugs that can cause fully immersive hallucinatory plane crashes on purpose don't exist as far as Merrin knows but maybe that was an ordinary nightmare...? She's aware that she is really stretching here but she's failing to come up with alternate hypotheses, just yet.) 

Okay, back to the alien hypothesis. Aliens who don't have afterlives? Aliens who don't know they have afterlives because their Gods are so uninvolved they somehow failed to mention it? Aliens who are also outsiders because several of the outer planes are infinite and there's no reason to suppose there aren't whole planets out there if you think about it? He also doesn't have any idea how or why she could have gotten here, but if any of the handful of spellcasters on Golarion capable of casting interplanetary teleport are involved there are quite a few people who need to know immediately.

"Think – yes. Remember – person – say – " he repeats the phrase for Teleport in every language he knows, Taldane and Draconic and Infernal and Kelish and Osirian and Elven and even Azlanti. "Person – touch – you? Remember – nausea?" That's a common teleportation side effect. "Remember – person – say – " Plane Shift, same deal as before. 

Merrin listens so closely and intently to this! It does not really resolve any of her key confusions. 

"....I don't remember hearing either of those phoneme strings? I - maybe had some nausea, just from turbulence and motion sickness, given that the plane was crashing. It wasn't the thing I was paying attention to. The last thing I remember is - pain, I guess. It was very brief but I'd expected dying via massive trauma to be fast." 

He wishes he could cast Tongues. Of course, he wishes he wasn't a useless excuse for a wizard who can't even hang second-circle spells, so he could be doing something helpful not cowering in a thousand-year-old basement, and if wishes were horses he'd never make a silver casting Mount. Useless or not, if unknown and vastly powerful beings are causing metaphysical anomalies two days into his revolution he'd better do something about it. 

"You – come." He holds up a length of cloth. "Not – see. Not – know – this – location."  

Merrin isn't sure what he's trying to convey by holding up the length of cloth, but she's aware that she's not thinking at her best right now. A predictable consequence of being put in a confusing situation after spending the last few minutes frantically trying to do all of the right emergency-response actions while certain she was going to die. 

"...I didn't see how I got here, no. From my perspective it was just a discontinuity. And I - seem to not be injured? Which is weird since I do remember the crash hurting - I thought maybe it was a nightmare but usually I don't remember dreams this clearly after the fact, and also I'm decent at lucid dreaming and if I get as far as thinking to check if I'm dreaming that almost always works and I'm sure I did try that. ...Anyway, no, I don't know this location and it doesn't look very much like anywhere I would recognize." 

Élie really wishes he had Tongues. He pantomimes blindfolding himself. Does that work? 

"- Um, I definitely wasn't blindfolded before the plane crash? Or at any point that I remember? If that's what you're asking. I'm not sure why you're trying to point at words in my flashcards to talk to me - but you seem to understand me when I say things out loud, so–"

Pause. Right. Merrin is confused about more things than her method of arrival here, and the kid seems to be able to understand her, and he's currently letting her talk. 

"- Um, you seemed really scared of me when I first got here? I'm - not used to anyone being scared of me and I wasn't expecting it and I figure the reason for that is another thing I'm missing." 

....okay he's just going to blindfold her. 

Ohhhhhh, was he - asking her for permission to cover her eyes so she wouldn't see this location? ...Some other location, presumably, she already had plenty of opportunity to see this one. Not that she took much advantage of it, and also it has relatively few distinguishing features. 

Merrin still has very little idea what's going on, but in almost all of the possible scenarios, fighting this wouldn't help even if she could succeed at it, so she doesn't. 

In that case, she's going to be led through a confusing series of tunnels until she has no idea where she started or which direction she's going in or even which way is up. 

When the blindfold is removed, she's tied to a chair in a wine cellar. Élie's there, along with a middle aged couple. He bows slightly; a native Galtan would parse it as ironic but Merrin probably won't. "Merrin, Jean-Claude and Gabrielle; Jean-Claude and Gabrielle, Merrin." 

This has gone so far beyond 'the weirdest thing ever to happen to her' that Merrin's emotions were left behind a while ago. 

...Also this isn't even the first time in Merrin's life that she's been tied to a chair, specifically, though the other occasions were much more romantic and more something she had agreed to in advance. She has no mental scripts for this! Work or social or otherwise! It's kind of ridiculous for the social awkwardness of this situation to be more upsetting than - anything else about this situation - but, there you have it. 

"- Hi?" she says, and she's tense enough that her voice is kind of squeaky which is also embarrassing and she hasn't felt this embarrassed since she was seventeen. "Um. I'm still not sure what the constraints on communication are, and I'm also getting the sense that maybe none of you know what's going on either, but I'm really confused. ...I am not here to be a threat to any of you. In case that wasn't just obvious." 

"She says she's confused and doesn't intend to be a threat to us," he dutifully repeats in Taldane. And then, to the couple – "You may as well do it now." 

         "How do you intend to question her, pantomime?" 

"If you'd rather wait until the morning, of course – " 

          "Or we could just kill her now, like sensible people." 

"If she's a spy, they're trying something so utterly bizarre we can't afford not to figure it out, they have capabilities we never even guessed at – "

          "Don't be a child. You think she'll talk?" 

                     "I don't want that woman in my home." 

          "Take it up with our young friend." 

"Some of us didn't want to wait thirty years for other people to start their revolution." 

           "You think you understand the secret police – "

 "I think none of us understand the half of what's happening right now." 

            "...."

            "I'll have my spells in eight hours." 

"Do you want to guess where we'll be in eight hours?" 

                     "She's not staying here." 

             "Have it your way." 

The older man turns to Merrin. "Zone of Truth."

Merrin watches the back and forth. Tries to glean as much as she can from the nonverbals. 

(She would probably be a lot more upset and scared if she were any less incredibly confused.)

The couple are older. Going off body language and facial expressions, they're - probably also higher in the chain of authority than the kid? They're frustrated, maybe.

And scared. Why is everyone apparently scared of her? This is terrible! 

- huh, that....felt like something? The older man said some words to her, or at least while looking at her and making eye contact, and she didn't understand the words but it somehow still felt like she was - receiving information that meant something. She's not sure what the information is. It feels like it might be communication-related but that's - in some sense easily inferable given that he conveyed it to her by speaking out loud? 

They're still scared, she thinks. For some reason that she doesn't understand and that makes no sense but that doesn't make it matter less. 

Merrin tries to make eye contact and look as harmless as possible, and waits. 

"Do – you – know – of – Cheliax." The last word is spoken.

Merrin, again, listens intently. 

"...Um, no, I don't recognize that word. 'Cheliax'? Is that an - object? A place? A person?" 

He translates. The woman responds. "That doesn't prove anything. They use unwitting agents. We use unwitting agents." 

Élie turns back to Merrin. "Have – you – been – before – Golarion?" 

They continue to seem really hostile! Merrin, despite her best efforts, is getting kind of freaked out!

If this is a training scenario where they gave her amnesia on purpose then - even aside from her uncertainty about whether that's possible and/or a standard practice for advanced Exception Handling training - she feels like, if it's that, she's going to be really mad at someone about this after? Which wouldn't be helpful toward anyone's goals, here, and that would be a predictable fact about Merrin to anyone smarter than Merrin, so she wouldn't have thought they would do it at all? 

"- Um, Golarion is the - planet that you showed me the map of earlier? I didn't recognize the map. I've never been to a planet other than dath ilan, the one I live on, and I didn't know there were other inhabited planets and I definitely didn't know of a way I could end up on one of them by accident." 

Of course, she could have made her save. This would be easier if they had a cleric of Abadar. But he can  do due diligence. "You – say – not – true – thing." That one's not a question. 

The pointing-at-words communication method is terrible. Merrin can't tell whether he's accusing her of saying something untrue or asking her to say something untrue on purpose? ...His expression maaaaybe looks more questioning than angry, which is - possibly - information. 

"Um, I might be misinterpreting but if you're requesting that I say something that isn't true -" wow this feels like it shouldn't be nearly so hard to think of, but she keeps only thinking of true things where the opposite isn't something she can easily communicate in a sentence, "I was–" 

And she had meant to say 'born in Last Resort', which would be obviously false and absurd to anyone in dath ilan even if they didn't know Merrin personally, but she - can't - what - 

Merrin is making such a confused and indignant expression right now. 

           "All you've proven is that the spy can act." 

"Can you think of one mortal reason why she'd be acting like this?" 

           "So King's spymasters thought of something I can't. Tell the truth. Did you bring her here because you didn't want to kill her yourself?" His voice gets a little softer. "There's no shame in that. You don't have to get  used to killing so quickly. You'll have plenty of time." 

  "No." Élie brandishes the e-reader. "Look. Have you ever in your life seen anything like this? If she's a spy, it means that Cheliax has access to technology beyond our imagination, or to magic that doesn't look like magic, maybe there's some secret internal research project or they really did make contact with aliens or they're playing a completely different game than we thought they were, either way, we're screwed. And that's not even what matters, is it, because you know perfectly well we were screwed to begin with. Let's say we take the palace, and hold the palace, and enough of us survive to put up some kind of a front when Infrexus come to his senses and sends another couple hundred combat wizards to Isarn. It will take a miracle for us to win. And if she really is an alien, we might just have been handed one. Her planet has machines that fly. Imagine if we had those, we wouldn't be trying to secure a border with four teleporters. Look at her books. They have pills that cure consumption, they can replace missing limbs without magic. What else does she know? What else would we be giving up?"  

            "...."

                 "...."

The woman responds first.  "You stay with her tonight. If she does anything – I mean it, if she blinks in a way that looks mildly suspicious – " 

"I'll kill her. I swear. I'll even take care of the body." 

          "And you'd better not get any blood in my good '89 Caladoc." 

That seems to break the tension. Élie laughs. "On my honor as a citizen of Galt."  

          "And don't drink it, either." 

"Gabrielle! What do you take me for?" 

          "A child who never learned to listen to his elders. Good night, Élie." 

"Good-night. Do try live 'till tomorrow morning." 

If this is a training scenario then Merrin hates everything about her entire life right now and she's going to be submitting some official complaints to Governance. 

If it's not a training scenario - which is, honestly, seeming more and more likely - then -

- then on some level that's a lot worse, right, but also it's a lot harder to be upset or angry about, somehow. Because instead she's confused. And then curious. And - (this is an objectively ridiculous attitude to bring here, but it feels like it fits with all of the other ways in which Merrin is weird as a person) - and it feels simpler, somehow, that twenty subjective minutes ago she had expected to die the true death and never have any experiences again. And now she's here. And it's objectively a scary situation but - what's the worst that can happen? They attack her with a knife, or something, and maybe she dies but she had thought that was guaranteed less than an hour ago, and maybe she doesn't die. And right now they don't, actually, seem like they're about to try to kill her. 

She watches their faces and their body language and tries to infer as much as she can from it, which isn't really that much even though she's well above median for this skill among dath ilanis. She is quietly frustrated and also confused about what language they're even speaking - she doesn't personally know any conlangs properly, or anything, but it feels like she'd recognize the sound of one and this is more alien - and she holds still, and waits for further prompting. 

The older couple leaves. Élie unties Merrin from the chair. He reaches into his bag and pulls out half a loaf of bread, some hard cheese, and, incongruously, an irate live magpie. (If Merrin didn't know better, she'd swear it was swearing). He offers the food to Merrin, and then produces some kind of dried fruit for the bird. 

It's a bird! Chirping in ways that sound like words and eating dried fruit! Adorable! 

- also a minor side point that changes nothing about Merrin's actual situation. 

She smiles at the kid and accepts the - food-items? she's not totally sure what they are but they at least resemble food? - from the kid, and takes a nibble. ...Sure. That's food. Entirely edible. Not even the worst-tasting thing she's eaten. 

She chews and swallows and looks over at him again. "Can you still understand me?" 

He shakes his head. (That was his second Comprehend Languages, and it wore off a couple minutes ago). 

If Merrin had been planning better she would have tried to confirm what his constraints were on understanding her while he definitely still understood her! She wasn't, though. Which isn't, in itself, even very interesting to note - sure, if she had another ten years of training in the same general direction that her past training was pointed in, she would have handled this better, but it doesn't seem that compelling that she could counterfactually have made a different and much better choice here, with the skill she has now. She could have been pushier, but all her social instincts were yelling that this would go badly, and so she didn't, and she has super not been murdered with a knife yet which seems like a success here. Tentatively. 

(Hopefully this will turn out to have been a psychotic break hallucination the whole time.) 

The kid's bird continues to be really cute, and Merrin is having a TERRIBLE DAY and needs distractions. She makes a chirping noise at the bird and offers it a bit of her bread. 

The bird looks at her indignantly and says, quite distinctly, "I do have a name, you know." 

Élie taps it on the beak. "Give her a break, she doesn't speak the language." 

Merrin does not understand the words spoken but she can read subtext at all. Oh no, she somehow managed to be socially awkward in an interaction with a BIRD???

...Which can talk, which makes it both less unlike being socially awkward with another human, and also probably more likely that this is hallucination, but STILL. 

She...is going to go on offering bits of bread to the bird in between eating it herself, but not make further chirping noises. 

...yeah, he'll go for the bread, he's hungry. But it's really the LEAST she could do. Chirping. Imagine.  

Élie points to the bird. "Félix." Come to think of it, he never gave Merrin his own name. He points to himself. "Julien Camille Élie Cotonnet. Élie." 

Merrin looks up, frowns slightly and then smiles. "Félix?" It's an odd phoneme but she can mostly get her mouth to do it. 

...The human teenager's probable-name, on the other hand, has so many syllables in it! None of them are individually that unpronounceable - at least, Merrin can manage basically all the consonants in a recognizable form, for some of the vowel intonations she can't entirely parse the sound let alone say it - but mainly the problem is that he just said, like, twelve syllables in a row and Merrin's working memory is below average. 

- maybe less than twelve, there was a repeat in there? 

"Elee?" she tries. No, almost but not quite right. She makes a face. "Ju-lee-enne Cam-[mumble] Elie?" 

That's pretty close! "Eh-lee." Personally, he thinks his name has a very respectable number of syllables. Some of his friends get up to fifteen or twenty. 

"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." 

"Certainly, I can get you paper and ink." 

Hopefully she knows how to use a quill pen!  

Merrin knows how to make improvised writing supplies in the wilderness! This isn't exactly the same setup but she has a much easier time figuring it out. It only takes her about a minute. 

She writes down some notes, in Baseline and also personal shorthand (it's not a cipher designed to be private but it's very shorthand and likely to be opaque even if someone uses translation magic on it.) 

A number of different mental notes are now DUMPED and she can THINK again. Great. Merrin takes a couple of deep breaths. 

"I'm confused about 'gods', but I think mostly in a way where they don't map to anything that exists in dath ilan or any -" what this language doesn't have a word for 'trope' what kind of language is this even, "- any fictional worldbuilding convention, I guess, that I recognize from dath ilan. So I might be less confused once I have more examples to work with and more - descriptions of what their goals and capabilities and properties are and what they actually do over time and things. I - suspect I'm more fundamentally confused about the 'Law' versus 'Chaos' and 'Good' versus 'Evil' part - especially the first pair, but the fact that they're part of the categorization system and the first dichotomy doesn't make any sense is making me suspicious about the translation of the second pair too. Can you try to explain 'Law' and 'Chaos' to me like you would to a four-year-old child who hadn't encountered any of the math around Coordination at all yet or any other basic principles of physics and didn't already know the words?" 

Élie desperately wants to know what sort of math the aliens use to coordinate and what sort of civilization gets by without the concepts of Law and Chaos and the best way to teach physics to four-year-old children. Not the time. 

"There's a great deal of disagreement here in Golarion about what Law and Chaos are, besides fundamental organizing principles of the universe. But if I had to reduce it to the things everyone agrees on – Law is order, consistency, structure. It's the reason why I can expect this room will still be here tomorrow, and the river Sellen will still flow into the Inner Sea, and my left hand won't be made out of apricot preserves. Mortal societies are more Lawful when they have explicit, unambiguous rules for their citizens to follow; individual mortals are more Lawful when they obey them. 

Chaos is – fluidity, unexpectedness, variation. The plane we call the maelstrom is the Chaotic Neutral afterlife, but many cosmologists think it's also the primordial soup all the other planes are floating in. Nothing in it is the same from one moment to the next – if it even makes sense to think about time there, which is an open question – and anything that does manage to settle and solidify will eventually become its own plane, separated out from the essence of chaos. Mortal societies are chaotic when they're more open to change, or allow their citizens more mobility, or adapt themselves to a greater variety of ways of being. 

As far as I know, there's really no such thing as pure Law or pure Chaos. Even the Maelstrom has structures in it, and Axis – that's the Lawful Neutral plane –  presumably isn't just a perfectly uniform stationary arrangement of matter. They say it has neighborhoods. I don't really understand how the balance of Law and Chaos in the outer planes is supposed to work and nobody's ever given me an adequate explanation, but I wanted to flag it as a gap in my understanding. Ditto how this interacts with Gods. I could tell you obvious things, like that Lawful gods tend to be more predictable and easier to bind to specific agreements, but I bet there's some deeper metaphysical truth there, just one that's beyond me and maybe beyond mortals period." 

Merrin is jotting down shorthand notes so fast! 

The concept that at a deep level, physical reality is made out of certain math (maybe different math, here?) which can be distilled down into more easily-summarized principles: sure, seems reasonable.

.....Wait what does that have to do with societies making people follow rules? That's not– okay, fine, she can see the analogy and she did ask him to explain it to her like she was four. And on a sufficiently deep and fundamental level there's probably a lot of the same math. Merrin isn't sure, she's terrible at math. 

Oddly, the explanation of 'Chaos' is less confusing. At least on a narrative level. The concept that - whatever a 'plane' is and whatever an 'afterlife' is - everything else is embedded in the 'Chaotic' 'Neutral' afterlife plane - anyway, that does not obviously click for Merrin. It sort of kind of reminds her a little of some physics lessons she half-remembers, or more likely some debates she's overheard between other people with more developed physics knowledge and opinions. Remarking on this does not leave her any less confused. 

- this is a fantasy setting why is it making her dredge up ancient half-forgotten memories of physics classes - 

No such thing as pure– yeah of course that would be like saying 'you can have either pure mass or pure gravity'. ....Actually Merrin's not sure it would be like that at all. Maybe she should just stop trying to map over everything he says that sounds like it could be vaguely referring to her past math or physics lessons. This is a bizarre fantasy setting where even basic economics doesn't hold together. Maybe it's not even made of math–

Yeah she's going to stop thinking about that now too. 

".....I think it's possible I'm doing a really bad job of listening as though I were a four-year-old child and I'm trying to map over a lot of preconceptions that don't actually fit with how anything works here? I - sorry - I'm not actually sure what would help on your end. Maybe it'll make more sense once I ask more questions. Can you tell me about the 'afterlives' here, I know there are nine of them according to that whole categorization schema and you mentioned a couple of things about what different ones are like, but I could maybe use a more thorough overview here or something." 

"I'm starting to think it might be more useful if you could explain some of those preconceptions to me, but I'll do my best. I wouldn't worry too much if it doesn't make sense – scratch that, I'd worry very much because it's all of tremendous metaphysical importance and impacts the continuity of our immortal souls and so on and so forth, but it's not like anyone in Golarion is doing much better. I think we're all just doing our best to come up with rough analogies that don't contradict our observations too blatantly. 

Anyway. Afterlives! Lawful Good is Heaven, that's where they lead the assault on the evil afterlives. It's the one I know the least about, since the information that exists in Cheliax is obvious blatant lies. Probably it involves fighting demons. Maybe farming? The god of agriculture is Lawful Good for some reason. It's probably a fine place to spend eternity if you're exceptionally selfless and don't have a sense of humor. 

Axis, Lawful Neutral, I already mentioned it – they say it's a perfectly orderly golden city with countless millions of districts for every species and civilization on the material plane. The followers of Lawful Neutral gods claim that it's the afterlife that's the most like living. It sound really lovely, except for the thing where it's full of Lawful people. 

....Lawful Evil's Hell. Petitioners there are tortured forever. The Church claims some of them eventually get to rise through the ranks until they're allowed to torture other people, but they're probably lying about how common it is and how long it takes and how much of yourself you get to keep at the end of it. 

The Neutral Good afterlife is called Nirvana. It is a place of rest and healing and recovery from the trials of mortal life. And also of being turned into animals. I don't know why, none of the other afterlife planes do that. 

True Neutral is the Boneyard. That's where the goddess Pharasma sits and decides where mortal soul should go. They say she hates it when people end up there, so it's mostly just children who died too young to be judged. 

The Neutral Evil afterlife is Abaddon. The outsiders that live there eat souls – if your soul gets eaten, you're just destroyed, goodbye forever. Pharasma doesn't approve of that either, so petitioners assigned to Abaddon can choose to go to Hell or the Abyss instead. – the Abyss is Chaotic Evil and it's not very interesting, just demons fighting each other in an endless war of all against all. 

I already told you about the Maelstrom. That leaves Elysium, the Chaotic Good afterlife. It's supposed to be a beautiful unspoiled wilderness with no signs of civilization, but I think that's stupid, since I have to imagine lots of Chaotic people want to live in cities and who's going to stop them? At least the floating jeweled islands and singing waterfalls sound neat." 

Okay. Focus. She can do this.  Forget what the things sound like, she knows the translation-magic is doing something weird - set that information aside for the moment, she can't actually do that, but she can attempt the mental motion - and focus on the descriptions. 

She takes very rapid notes. 

Lawful
- 'Assaulting' one of the afterlives with an Evil alignment. 
- Agriculture. Which is probably a precursor to Civilization, so that fits, although now she has questions about afterlife ecosystems - clearly they have plants, do the plants come from plants in this plane that died??? 
- Cities. Organization in general? There does seem to be something Coordination-flavored there. 
- ...Whatever 'ranks' are. It's probably not the same thing as the different ranks of Keeper. Given the torture. 

Chaotic 
- Wilderness, the opposite of cities
- Landscapes as surreal art installations. 
- Reality not obeying legible consistent physical laws. 
- If certain cosmologists are right then Chaos existed before anything else did? 
- People fighting other people for no reason? Which is pretty 'the opposite of Coordination', so. 

Good
- Focused on being 'selfless' which probably means altruism but she's not taking for granted that it doesn't mean 'literally does not have conscious experiences' or something, this world is weird. 
- Not having a sense of humor. (Or is that associated with the Lawful part of Lawful Good?) 
- Rest and healing and recovery 
- Turning into animals??? But the other Good afterlives don't do that so maybe it's a one-off. 
- People...getting to do the things they want to do and not other things? Hinted at by Élie's description of 'Elysium' but maybe that's just Chaos actually. 

Evil
- Being tortured forever 
- Having 'torturing people' as a life goal for some reason, or at least that seemed like the implication? 
- True Death
- The 'demons fighting each other forever for no reason' might factor out with Evil and not Chaos, actually. 

She's...made progress? Maybe? Something there sort of hangs together, not yet in a way where she could give an explicit verbal description let alone math - which means she does not, in fact, understand what's going on at all - but she feels like she has something to go on when it comes to interpreting what the words mean. 

(Also she hates this place! It's kind of absurd to be upset about being here when the alternative she had expected was permanently ceasing to exist, this is not in fact worse than PERMANENTLY CEASING TO EXIST, but this does not mean that she's happy about it!) 

"I need a couple of minutes to think," she tells Élie, speaking very calmly because she does have the basics of Dignity down even in a situation as outside of her skillset and comfort zone as this one. Dath ilan doesn't teach people to crumple in the face of baffling and upsetting situations. That's not even Exception Handling, those lessons start when you're six. 

So she is not going to freak out. 

"- Right. I am not entirely un-confused but I'm less confused, I think? I - sorry, I'm not sure if this is a question that you're going to find easy to answer, but it would be helpful if you could point out some of the things about Cheliax and its Governance that are specifically Lawful, and ones that are specifically Evil. If there are other, um," what was the word for it, it wasn't cities, "- countries, that also have an alignment but a different one, I think it would be helpful if you could go through some of the different combinations, point out how Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil would be different from Lawful Evil?"