Merrin has been having such a day and she was pretty sure she was about to die permanently! 

- but that does not seem to be the thing that's happening now!

Instead, she's.....somewhere else. Which is definitely not a plane currently crashing. And she's definitely not dead, and it doesn't feel like she's injured either. 

None of Merrin's extensive training in unexpected bizarre situations is meant to address this particular one! She has no idea how to respond reasonably, but she's - going to look around at her surroundings? This is generally a good place to start? 

She is in the middle of the woods! 

There is a very short, small woman, probably in her early twenties, holding a knife and some kind of... five-pointed flame branch star thing. "Hello! I'm Inaaya Sedna. I don't mean you any harm. Can you understand what I'm saying?" she says in what is an obvious Exception Handler Dealing With Someone Who Might Freak Out At Any Minute Voice. 

This would be fascinating, if not for the part where it's instead concerning and terrifying because none of her current sensory input appears to follow in any way from what was happening five subjective seconds ago!

On the one hand, 'when you were almost certainly about to die in an unrevivable way' is...not that far off from 'maybe actually you were successfully frozen' but that doesn't explain the random wilderness. Or the knife which the woman is holding as though it's a weapon; Merrin isn't sure what about the knife-holding posture parses as that, but it's very concerning! The five-pointed flame branch star thing is confusing and concerning and all of this is really incongruous with the tone of voice. The woman is speaking to her as though Merrin might be about to do something concerning. 

She does not understand the words. 

Merrin is mostly failing to come up with any hypothesis for what's happening right now. The knife is distracting. 

"- Sorry, I don't know that conlang?" she says uncertainly. 

Inaaya repeats the message in all the languages she knows: Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Cat, and Dreaming.

Conlang, more conlang, what, none of those even sound like things she's heard snippets of before, who is this person - 

- oh finally Merrin can understand her! The woman really took her time about that! 

(...a note of niggling confusion, but Merrin is way too distracted, by the knife and other things, to catch onto it properly.) 

If the woman doesn't mean her harm then why the weapon???  

"- I don't mean you any harm either," she says, trying to sound calmer than she is, "but - I don't know how I got here or where 'here' is and–"

(Merrin is, completely without realizing it, also speaking Dreaming.) 

Pause. 

Right. 

Wow, this is incredibly hard and awkward to say for real. Merrin is slightly gritting her teeth about it. "Um. Tsi-imbi...?"

(This word does not translate into Dreaming.)

"You have traveled to another plane of existence. I assume from your reaction that you're not experienced with this and didn't do it on purpose."

She sheathes the knife; she doesn't want to be threatening.

Okaaaay. She said the thing and nobody is turning up to tranquilize her. This isn't incredibly plausible as a hallucination anyway, medically speaking, it's - it feels kind of absurd to say it's too coherent, but that's the sense she has. Which she isn't going to fully trust because if she is hallucinating then probably her metacognition is also broken. 

So. Not ruling out that she's having a psychotic break and this is a hallucination. There's not really anything to do about that, though, aside from - ignoring any urge to harm herself or others, even if something happens that makes it seem like a reasonable response? 

- is this a dream? Merrin doesn't lucid-dream very often and the few times she has, she usually woke herself up within seconds - and she doesn't think she's ever had a false negative once she got to the point of questioning if she was dreaming. She's not going to rule it out either, metacognition in dreams is also affected, but - again, it's not clear what to do about that possibility. 

"I - didn't think traveling to another plane of existence was possible," she says. "I definitely didn't do it on purpose. My last experience before this was being about to die in a plane crash and then there was a - discontinuity in my subjective experience and then I was here. If you have an explanation for how and why that happened I would like to hear it although I'm not going to believe it at face value since it's possible I'm dreaming or hallucinating this." 

"That's a completely fair response," Inaaya says. "There are many different universes and sometimes they are metaphorically closer to each other and people cross between them, sometimes deliberately and sometimes not. There is an explanation which involves more math but it'd probably require about two or three years of study to grasp and it's not really more intuitively satisfying." 

"Or I can help!" says a voice from a tree.

"--Hello, Tristan," says Inaaya.

Tristan turns out, on closer inspection, to be dangling upside down out of a tree.

"If you would like a full intuitive understanding of how to cross between universes I can definitely help!"

"She does not."

"Awww."

Oh no. Math. If the explanation involves math then Merrin probably should try to understand it but the process will absolutely be miserable and humiliating. She thought she was done with the part of her life that involved struggling to keep up with math lessons. (Most dath ilanis aren't placed in lessons at a level that will involve that much miserable struggling, but Merrin was stubborn, and determined to make it through all of the prerequisites to train as an Exception Handling EMT.) 

- oh. Person hanging in a tree. That might be evidence for the 'dream' hypothesis just by dint of being inexplicable and weird? 

(She still does not wake up.) 

For now she will continue treating this as though it's real. "Um, thank you. I - might want to try to learn the math anyway, especially if that's the only way to get back?" 

"We don't know how to reliably target getting people to a particular location in spacetime while leaving them in the mental condition they started out in."

"'Reliably' and 'in the mental condition they started in' are the key words here."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah???

"What do you mean by leaving them in the mental condition they started out? How does it change people's mental condition - would it have done that to me, what sort of change would I want to be looking out for -?" 

"--okay, so, what I think we should do is that we should get you to a coffeeshop and get some food in you, and then I can answer questions."

"She's in my woods. I think she's mine."

"That's not how woods work."

"Things that turn up in my woods are mine. That's the rule."

Merrin might recognize this voice as the Extremely Tired Exception Handler voice. "She's a person. She doesn't belong to anyone."

"Really she belongs to Delta Green and aren't they going to be mad when they discover Prometheus sniping her out from under them. --You're welcome for that, by the way."

Merrin suddenly has additional questions! Also concerns. So many concerns. Though mostly confusion. 

"I think I would rather go to a 'coffeeshop'," flicker of confusion, what is that, "than stay in the wilderness. I do know how to survive in the wilderness but probably not here if it's another plane of existence, the edible plants might be different. What's Delta Green and what's Prometheus?" 

"We're both organizations that deal with-- unusual situations that most people aren't capable of dealing with. Like yours."

That has implications. Implications which could be intriguing or terrifying and Merrin isn't sure which. She's finding it hard to properly reason through any of the implications of this bizarre situation, actually, and she's not sure if it's a defect in her training– no, it doesn't make sense to think of it that way, her curriculum was designed by people much smarter and better-informed than her who, one assumes, had no idea that...whatever is even happening right now...was a live possibility that it made sense to prepare someone like her for. It could also just be her. She's not exactly good at figuring out complex confusing problems on her own. 

"Like mine? What - do you know about me and what I do and the world I'm from? ...Also I still want to know more things about where I am but if you think it makes sense to have that conversation once we're not in the forest anymore, I understand that." 

"We can start talking while we walk to my car, it'll be a while."

"I want pancakes. You should get me pancakes."

"...All right. Pancakes for everyone. --I don't know anything about where you're from or who you are."