Merrin is having a pretty good day!

(Or, rather, she is having a meta-level pretty good day, despite the fact that all of her object-level recent experiences have been mostly unpleasant and terrible! The air temperature is well below 0 C, which she is definitely aware of despite all her cold-weather gear, and also she's now been awake for like twenty hours straight.)

Her next objective for this wilderness-survival-and-rescue sim is to reach that mountain peak, over there, which she has been trying to do for at least six hours, and in that time period she has slipped or fallen in really embarrassing ways at least three times. But she's getting closer! Wilderness-survival-and-rescue sims are great! 

Okay this sim is mildly unfair! There was literally zero foreshadowing about the random potential casualty on that other mountain face! Who is now, apparently, falling a - really long way, actually, aaah -? 

(Merrin is not actually very panicked about this, because obviously it's still a sim, just an unexpectedly mean one.) 

(...Also the person - woman, probably? - is maybe...naked...? Merrin doesn't actually have a great view, it doesn't take that long for someone to fall 600 ft and she is already sprinting toward the landing site.) 

This sim is incredibly unfair! There is an entire slope of loose rocks which are themselves covered in ice, and Merrin slips and falls TWICE on her way there.

But she does, in fact, reach the site within 40 seconds, and flings herself down beside the casualty.

(Who she is presumably supposed to end up emergency-cryopreserving, since, you know, falling from that height is not really survivable - which would be fine and not even interesting in a more normal sim, Merrin has totally run the standard solo emergency cryo sim 500-plus times at this point in her Exception Handling career. But this was supposed to be a no-backup limited-resources sim, and she's...not even actually sure what she's supposed to do here?? She has some improvised medical supplies on her person, but not the ones she would need to start the cryo protocol, let alone finish it??

...Maybe the entire point, the thing they're testing her on here, is that the almost-certainly-dead casualty is already, like, in a snowbank, and Merrin is supposed to assume that will cool their brain adequately, and so she's supposed to move on and rescue the next person...? If so she HATES this sim ALREADY–)

- Merrin is thinking ahead, if not in maximally useful ways, but she is also checking for a pulse, just in case. 

This person is unconscious and bleeding but has a pulse! And is also an actual human rather than a medical-sim human-body-model, if Merrin is inclined to notice that twenty hours into a sim.

... also, even splayed on the ground with multiple compound fractures, she's somehow ridiculously hot. Infohazardously hot, in a way that makes even people who don't quite get dath ilani faceblanding understand the meaning of that phrase. It's something about her that isn't entirely inferable from just looking at her face and body (which are not actually looking all that great relative to their set-point); one gets the sense that a picture of her would convey a smaller than usual portion of her attractiveness.

Oh, and yeah, she's super naked.

- wow. Okay. This is maybe the first time in Merrin's entire life that she has found someone distractingly attractive?? Is this what neurotypical people have to deal with all the time, because if so it's amazing they get anything done

She has in fact managed to notice that this is an actual human presumably-actor rather than a human-body-model, and...is flagging some confusion, but not quite stridently enough to call out an Exception on her radio and check if this is actually supposed to be part of the sim. (It would be so embarrassing if she did that and was wrong.) 

Well. She has the basic equipment on her to take a manual blood pressure reading, on this person who is conveniently naked (which she should maybe prioritize doing something about, given the below freezing air temperature) - but she's going to get a blood pressure reading first, and also check for signs of obvious external bleeding. 

- and start repeating saying, out loud, "My name is Merrin, Exception Handling EMT, you just fell from a mountain but everything's okay just hold still, open your eyes if you can hear me?" because maybe she was actually totally wrong about how far the woman fell? Maybe that's something you can be wrong about when you've been awake too long? 

External bleeding: she has a lot of broken bones, several of which have pierced the skin. The largest amount of blood is coming from her upper leg, where her femoral artery appears to have been severed, but the more concerning thing is that several of her ribs are sticking out at an angle that implies the other ends are probably in her lung.

Blood pressure: approximately normal! Somehow.

Abrogail has permanent Tongues and can in theory speak and understand Baseline, but she is too unconscious to be doing that right now.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH????!!!!!!

- okay this doesn't make any sense?

(Merrin may not be well-equipped, in this superheated sewage dump of a sim, but she at least has bandages on her, and her hands are already moving to deal with the most concerning source of bleeding!)

....no, actually, though, this doesn't make sense???

Merrin has a number of very deeply trained mental habits, for both sims - designed to be as realistic as possible, though it's pretty hard to avoid medtechs falling into sim-trope-based reasoning sometimes - and also real actual situations. 

She has some trained habits on flagging if an event is happening, in what is supposed to be a sim, that seems like maybe it doesn't make sense and is possibly a random unexpected real medical emergency (or other emergency) that happened to coincide with her sim. This is vanishingly unlikely and so Merrin has never dealt with it in real life - she's run a few sims that included this, but of course, in a sim it's still a sim trope. 

- And so it's not really something anyone can judge Merrin on, that it takes her an entire 25 seconds after reaching the casualty, before she - while sort of sitting on the free end of the bandage that she just wrapped around the woman's leg - toggles on her radio and numbly declares a suspected Exception, using the legally regulated real-life tune, and then -

"- is she supposed to be a patient in the sim? if yes I have so many questions and if not I– if not I, I need help right now actually–" 

The rest of Merrin's team, 'out of range' for sim purposes but in fact on standby in a nearby medicopter, also have no idea if this is supposed to be part of the sim! It would hardly be good training for them if they did know exactly what was going to happen! 

...They were also kind of confused, though, and Merrin's announcement is all they need. They relay her comment back to the Exception Handling admin office running the sim, which should in fact know what is or isn't supposed to be happening in it. 

.......Yeah no that was not part of the plan! They are escalating this immediately!

Merrin's support team should head over to pick up Merrin and the ??casualty who fell off a mountain for real?? immediately. Further instructions incoming, they'll boot up the standard medical markets right away, but getting an ID on the patient is a really really high priority - 

They were super not expecting this either! But they do, in fact, all work for Exception Handling, and can cope with the unexpected. They head in - ETA 150 seconds, they weren't far - and confirm with Merrin by radio that this is NOT supposed to be part of the sim, they'll be right there, actual treatment priorities obviously pending an ID on the patient and more info on their advance directives and insurance, but in the meantime Merrin should - well, do all the obvious things that she's presumably already doing to keep the patient alive?? 

Merrin is doing the obvious things!!! She thinks she has the really-scary bleeding under control, and she's currently trying to gently shift the unconscious, naked and DISTRACTINGLY ATTRACTIVE somehow despite all the BONES STICKING OUT woman onto the thermal blanket from her supplies. Other than that, she....can get a really unreliable attempt at an O2 saturation measurement with her low-power portable sensor? Not that she can do anything about it if the result is bad. 

(The result is, like the blood pressure, also somehow fine?) 

"...I think this patient might be literally an alien," Merrin mutters into her radio. 

That seems low-probability but this concern is, of course, immediately passed on! They'll be there within 45 seconds, fingerprint scanner and retinal scanner are both ready, is the patient urgently in trouble? 

No!!! All the vital signs Merrin can actually measure are okay, pulse rate is a little elevated, blood pressure is totally normal, and...the patient doesn't look like she's dying? Or even like she's seriously injured and in shock, honestly?? She looks basically fine!! Until you notice the fact that it sure seems like her femoral artery was at least clipped by the fall-related trauma, and also probably both of her lungs are punctured by broken ribs! 

The medicopter lands.

.....That is super distracting!!!?? Merrin had not said anything about the 'infohazardously attractive' part!! Although, knowing Merrin, she maybe thought that was covered under 'this patient might be an alien' and/or calling an Exception within the sim scenario at all. 

They have a gurney and equipment to gently move the unconscious woman onto it, and all the medical sensors that Merrin has been desperately craving for the last couple of minutes. And they also have a fingerprint scanner to ID the patient, and a retinal scanner (tested literally this morning and definitely fully functional) to use if that doesn't work! 

Her colleague sort of slightly jostled her patient's arm and Merrin does not scream at him but she WANTS to! She is at this point ATTACHED! Even though she doesn't have the slightest idea who this woman is or what she was doing falling off a mountain and interrupting what was supposed to be a sim. 

(Merrin has been awake for more than twenty hours, at this point, and she's still basically functional but her emotional regulation is, perhaps, not at its usual baseline.) 

....All right that's enough suspense, ID should be going in now, who the flaming waste dump is her patient? 

Fingerprints: no match.

Retinae: no match.

... on the other hand that sure does look like a subcutaneous tracker-tag of the kind that's used on CRYOPRESERVED PEOPLE.

Within a half-minute of the fingerprints going into the system, there's a ping on the medicopter's loudspeaker.

"Exception," says the singsong voice. "Tick five."

(The database that the ordinary medical ID machines check against doesn't have Abrogail's fingerprints, but someone does, and after the Harkanam disaster they now get a quiet copy of every print read anywhere in dath ilan.)

UM

now Merrin is again feeling like this is probably a sim? Because - just, how, why - because that's too surreal to not be a sim, mostly.

(Except she still doesn't have any idea how they set up a human actor to be bleeding that much and not actually be in danger...) 

- while her emotions are busy running off in multiple directions, most of her attention is still turned toward listening for the announcement. That training dates back to well before she was even working as a nurse at all, let alone in Exception Handling.   

"This team has been exposed to a grade-six infohazard and is now under emergency quarantine. Please proceed to the following coordinates for debrief." The coordinates are several hundred miles away and, if one pulls up a civilian-grade satellite photo of the area, there appears to be nothing there.

Interim patient directives/info:

- Keep the patient alive even at the risk of moderate permanent damage. If it looks like there's a risk of severe brain damage they should go to cryo.

- Patient physiology is human, but suspected to be anomalously resilient.

- DO NOT ALLOW THE PATIENT TO REGAIN CONSCIOUSNESS. This patient is believed to be EXTREMELY DANGEROUS for secret reasons.

Resources: unlimited. There is not even a number on the screen this time. (No one has any idea how to calculate what the number should be, and they don't just make numbers up.)

There are no prediction markets. There are not in fact enough people read in on this situation for prediction markets to be useful. Instead the screen displays a videoconference panel of high-rank Keepers with medical specialties. They're using a non-market prediction-aggregation mechanism but even they are (though they don't show it) winging this.

One of the Keepers swears, with the really serious wording that is never ever used for any purpose but Real Serious Oaths, even in movies, that this is not a sim.

(Some small quiet voice in the back of Merrin's mind does, in fact, relax and step back after the Keeper swears the very serious oath that this isn't a sim.)

....What the radioactive salmonella poisoning is a grade six infohazard? Why is that even a thing?? What does it mean???

It means she will almost certainly never ever be able to tell her mom

....Moving on to the non-stupid or at least less-stupid thoughts about this:

What???????? 

Dear Merrin's brain: that still wasn't a non-stupid thought. 

Right. She is focused. She is definitely not distracted by the fact that her patient is NAKED and REALLY HOT in front of her.

Actually-medically-relevant thoughts in her queue:

- Yep she sure had noticed that the patient seems to be anomalously resilient!!! (Her team is great, and basic vital sign measures are already going up on the screens. The most recent blood pressure is - well, it's admittedly at the low end of normal, but it's still within the normal range! And they now have an actual O2 sat reading, which is also still within the normal range, though this is surprisingly and implausible enough that they're tossing an oxygen mask on her anyway, good.)

- The patient is apparently not an alien. Honestly, the surrounding circumstances are weird enough that Merrin is not really blaming herself for making that assumption, though. 

- They are apparently willing to risk various degrees of damage but not severe brain damage? ...Which means that Merrin really desperately wants her EEG sensor data like RIGHT NOW, and a brain CT scan from the portable medicopter unit in the next 60 seconds (...along with a full-body scan, since the patient sure does have a lot of horrifying injuries and it would be great to know more about the non-directly-visible parts, what if she's bleeding out internally or something -) 

....Also the patient is apparently, uh, dangerous? But for secret reasons, which is frustratingly unspecified! Merrin has certs for dealing with patients who are dangerous in normal ways, such as 'having a psychotic break, suddenly convinced that they need to by any means stop her from destroying Civilization which she is definitely about to do, and are also twice her size'.

Merrin is super not certed to handle dangerous patients when the danger is, itself, an UNSPECIFIED SECRET. 

- they did include actual clear instructions for that, though. Keep the patient unconscious. Well. The obvious solution is to induce anesthesia, intubate the patient and put her on a ventilator - which would be medically indicated ANYWAY given the HORRIFYING BROKEN RIBS if not for, uh, the fact that her oxygenation is apparently somehow still fine....

Anyway Merrin is noting a concern that the patient's apparent resilience to massive bleeding and punctured lungs might, in fact, correlate with similar resistance to sedatives? For all the obvious reasons, she does not love the idea of just giving the patient 10x the usual dose of sedatives, but, uh. She also doesn't want unspecified extreme danger to happen to anyone else? It's actually fine if it happens to her

Merrin spends 20 seconds or so waiting for the markets to give her a non-stupid treatment plan before remembering that, in fact, this situation is ridiculous and one of the ways in which it is ridiculous is that she doesn't have her usual, taken-for-granted medical prediction markets. Terrible. The handful of experts apparently read in on this case are, presumably, much smarter than her, but they're also still catching up. 

- so apparently if she wants decisions to happen fast, they need to be made by her, even though that's ridiculous. 

(it's not as though the rest of the situation isn't already ridiculous)

...All right, they're going to put this patient on a ventilator and keep ramping up the sedation (and painkillers, she has like twenty broken bones) until they either hit the literal maximum dose that their machines can administer, or her vital signs start to drop. Probably the second thing will be the limiting factor. Merrin is less sure of that than she would prefer. 

Yeah okay. Merrin's team is super weirded out by this whole situation, but they trust her and they will do that???

(The Crown of Infernal Majesty is an item of poison immunity among its frankly ridiculous number of other functions. Sedatives administered nonconsensually not only have no effect, they also—just disappear from her bloodstream? If anyone is measuring the concentration of drugs in her blood, it isn't going up.)

(Nobody is measuring the concentration of drugs in her bloodstream. In an actual hospital facility, they might, but the medicopter sensors are more limited.)

From Merrin's perspective: the patient's bleeding is now stopped! Scans sure show a lot of broken bones (which they're going to splint or otherwise stabilize as well as they can, while in transit) but she is not bleeding out internally or anything.

Oxygenation numbers are....totally fine, on literally room-air-O2-concentration and minimal pressure support from the ventilator. Rapid-test lab values are trickling in now and are...also basically fine?

(Merrin makes the call to give the patient some IV fluids and a blood transfusion anyway– uh, once they use the rapid-lab-test equipment to get all the details of her blood type, because she is apparently 'physiologically human' and not an alien but she's clearly a really weird human.) 

The patient's vital signs in fact don't change at all as they ramp up the sedative and painkillers to the maximum dose??? 

...Merrin is suspicious! And not sure what to be suspicious of! And she can't even query the wisdom of the medical prediction markets, just....register her suspicion and confusion with the handful of experts watching this. 

And then, well, she'll sit very close to the patient, watching her closely, and holding her still-limp hand definitely just because then she can keep her finger on the patient's radial pulse, why would there be any other reason

Expert recommendation: take a blood sample and then quit the sedation; it clearly isn't doing anything. Also, where are they on having any idea what's going on in the patient's brain? In addition to the EEG and CT scan, start preparing the brain-damage-byproduct sensor protocol, if they aren't already.

A few of the panel drop off screen to privately debate whether they should be advising someone to prepare to preemptively remove the patient's head if she starts looking too awake, given that she's shown herself both able and potentially willing to kill everyone on that medicopter with a thought.

(Abrogail does not have the material components for another Circle of Death and isn't going to start a fight while in an active flying machine anyway, she isn't stupid, but if she were able to hear that she'd definitely appreciate how afraid of her they are anyway.)

(This planet is doomed.)

Meanwhile, somewhere else, Exception Handling HQ is itself in a general state of Meta-Exception, because apparently dath ilan's most important and secret installation, which half of them didn't even know EXISTED before today and still aren't cleared to know ANYTHING about, got INVADED by WIZARDS from ANOTHER UNIVERSE. And now there's another alarm because someone just SPONTANEOUSLY APPEARED in a self-isolation chamber claiming (and appearing to all biometric scanners) to be Athpechya, which would normally be sufficient to establish her identity except for the part where earlier today she got KIDNAPPED AND REPLACED(?) by an EVIL WIZARD* VERSION OF HERSELF from the other universe, and then keyed in codes for a bunch of ADDITIONAL Exceptions apparently happening over there.

... okay, that has to be a software malfunction, right? That's, like, all the problems.

Can someone go, like, get her?

(*Dath ilan's knowledge of Golarion is not, at this point, advanced enough to tell the difference between arcane and divine magic.)

"... the hostile anomaly did WHAT and is now WHERE?!"

     "Yeah, Merrin's team ran into her on a training sim."

"While on the one hand that is probably objectively good, did anyone STOP TO CONSIDER that Merrin is now a GLOBAL CELEBRITY whom we now have to place under possibly INDEFINITE QUARANTINE without ANYBODY NOTICING?"

     "There's a million labor-hours in the prediction market for 'when Merrin burns out' and a lot of that is on 'soon'." (No one brings up the part where no one had any control over who found the anomaly because they know that wasn't Catchall's point.)

"I recognize that that strategy works for, like, programmers, but I am not sure it will work on a rank-five famous person. People will still wonder what she's up to."

     "We could fake some output for her. Say she's, like, writing an eleven-volume fantasy novel or something."

"... wait, what? Has she ever even shown any aptitude for fiction writing? [Implication: unlikely at her level of general intelligence.] And why eleven volumes specifically?"

     "... I honestly have no idea why I just said that."

"Nevermind. It was probably a joke you wouldn't understand."

(Why is his life LIKE THIS. Oh. Yeah. That's why.)

Uhhhhhhh that's super concerning!! Merrin is not a fan of patients who might just WAKE UP at ANY MOMENT even when they're not extremely dangerous for secret reasons!! In particular, this patient is hooked up to kind of a lot of equipment. Also the bleeding is mostly under control via application of direct pressure, but it'll need a full-on surgical intervention to actually repair the damaged artery, and the default protocol is not to do that in a moving helicopter. Though at least THIS one isn't in a storm. It's a rather calm and sunny winter day. 

They have EEG readings now (and Merrin's colleague is vacuuming hair from the floor before it gets into the equipment they're already setting out to place the brain-damage-byproduct sensor. CT image in two minutes and they'll transmit the file immediately once they have it. 

Merrin wishes to flag that, while she is certed for this, and even certed to do it in the air, it's a potentially high-risk procedure and she's been awake for a really long time, her vision is a little bit blurry. 95% odds she can do it without causing a serious complication that makes the damage much worse, but uh, checking that they in fact want her to take that risk. 

...Well, it's fairly critical information for their decision-making, it'll still be a while to the medical facility on the ground so they really can't wait until then, and the patient does also seem practically impossible to kill? 

OKAY FINE Merrin will do it. She is honestly actually too tired to feel especially stressed about it; she is just faintly irritated that her hands are shaky due to having taken way the fuck too many stimulants over the last eight hours. It takes her twice as long as it normally would.

Her brain is not producing any emotions about the possibility of the patient waking up and doing unspecified dangerous things to her. She is distantly peeved at the possibility that the patient might hurt her teammates, but mostly worried that the patient might, like, try to move or something and start bleeding uncontrollably again. 

...There you go, panel of secrecy-oathed medical experts, CT imagery now being transmitted over - last three minutes of EEG recording have been transmitted to them in real time - and they have the first readings coming in from the blood sensor. 

... that's a level of brain-damage byproducts that would not normally be associated with a living patient. Like, not even within an order of magnitude.

On the other hand, on the CT scan, her brain looks basically...fine? Like someone who suffered a pretty bad concussion and is going to be out for a little while, but nothing indicating serious permanent damage, never mind what you'd expect from a 600-foot fall off a cliff.

Oh, and it's getting...better? The first CT scan image is noticeably worse than the current one.

Uh, okay then.

Whatever anomalous process is somehow repairing the patient's brain (brains aren't supposed to be able to do that—where is it getting the information?), it appears to be slow enough that it's less than 20% likely the patient regains consciousness before they arrive at their destination. This prediction is qualified by the obvious fact that this patient is wildly out-of-distribution and the probability of the brain-repair process suddenly deciding to do something else entirely cannot really be estimated.

(In the background, someone—not Merrin, this isn't the sort of thing healthcare workers are supposed to do as a deontological principle—is told to very discreetly start readying the decapitation box from the emergency cryo setup for possible preemptive use.)

Current treatment plan: just keep her stable (she seems to be doing a fine job of that by herself, really), and watch the EEG readings very closely for any change, better or worse.

Well, uh, this should in some ways be less stressful than a patient who is not doing basically all the work of being stable on their own! 

...It's instead more stressful because Merrin has no idea how this patient WORKS, which means that her internal intuitive predictions are mostly returning ????, and also she doesn't have her superheated prediction markets, which is so unfair to have to deal with on this much accumulated sleep debt. 

(While other people may be worried that the mysterious brain-self-repair process will pick up speed and the patient will wake up on them, Merrin is worried that the process will stop working and the patient will PROBABLY INSTANTLY DIE because how the flaming sewage plant is that degree of obvious cell damage not setting off an inflammatory cascade of brain swelling - if the force preventing that stops working, it's not even clear if they'll have circulation for long enough to infuse cryoprotectants into her in the usual sequence.) 

Patient is also...not actually hypothermic at all, despite having been naked in the snow??? Do they, uh, want her and her team to cool the patient per one of the post-traumatic-brain-injury neuroprotective protocols? Merrin - is lowkey expecting that if they try it won't work, if the patient's neurological thermoregulation mechanisms are intact - which they probably are, because everything else seems to be working, she's even breathing spontaneously about the ventilator set rate. And they maybe can't actually sedate and paralyze her to prevent shivering thermogenesis. 

...They can try cooling the patient to 32 C, but abort if her temperature doesn't drop at the expected rate or she's visibly shivering, which would actually increase her overall metabolic rate and how much oxygen she's burning. 

Trying external cooling via the mattress and a cooling blanket over her, then. Also Merrin is making the call to give her another plasma transfusion because even if her blood pressure is literally normal, it can't be good for her to have lost that much blood volume. 

Crown of Infernal Majesty: +10 to cold resistance, which is sufficient for a reasonably fit person to lay in the snow naked basically indefinitely with no ill effects whatsoever.

So no, the cooling blanket is not having any effect.

(The Crown of Infernal Majesty is frankly kind of OP.)

So, by the way, they noticed this strange anomaly on the CT scan, and it wasn't the highest priority at the time, but could someone please check it out now? It looks kind of like the patient has a thin wire around her head.

Sure enough, there's an almost invisibly thin loop of metal wire around her head. It is utterly impossible to cut or remove.

Huh! The cooling is definitely not working, but - not in the way Merrin would have expected? She can't see any signs of increased metabolic rate and oxygen consumption that you would expect even just with non-shivering thermogenesis. The patient is just...immune to cold...somehow...? 

Mystery loop of metal wire is mysterious! Maybe it's some sort of advanced technology - or bizarre biology-affecting conceptualmagic, even - and it explains all the otherwise-inexplicable observations? 

...Well, it doesn't seem to be harming the patient, and figuring out what's going on is not Merrin's job right now. Merrin's job is - well, mostly just being ready to respond instantly if the patient's condition changes. 

She hovers and watches sensor data and updated scans and waits for their arrival at the mystery site. Hopefully it's a decently-equipped hospital? With someone on site who knows more about what's happening here???

The facility doesn't look like much from the air but that's because most of it is underground. A couple of Keepers in scrubs (flanked by a kind of concerning number of armed Security) take the patient away.

Another Keeper meets the medical team as they disembark the helicopter and explains that they should proceed to the civilian quarantine facility, which is [this way], and someone will be by soon to debrief them. Well. As soon as they, themselves, have a slightly better idea what's going on. No one is believed to be in any immediate danger, they aren't known to have been exposed to any alien diseases or anything, but they do have to be maximally cautious about these sorts of things.

... Merrin, in particular, has now been awake for a kind of implausible number of hours and should probably get some rest before her debrief?

He very much regrets to inform them that they will not be allowed to leave at least until the Keepers have at least a better idea of what the hazards here actually are. He wishes they could have been given the opportunity to recuse themselves but that's not the way the situation happened. The facility is able to meet pretty much any reasonable request they might have and they'll obviously be generously compensated for the inconvenience, as well as for their service today in keeping the patient stable. (Normally there would be numbers attached to this but this Keeper has, in fact, read Merrin's file.)

Yeah it's coming up on like 22 hours now. Merrin is simultaneously utterly exhausted and also still really wired on stimulants! She...is probably not super up for debriefing right now, no, but she also isn't actually going to fall asleep until she's had longer to convince her brain that the emergency is, in fact, over. 

(She is not going to think about being quarantined here and not even being able to tell her MOM until her brain is working slightly better in general.) 

....Also, as usual after an intense rescue, she is finding herself kind of upset about handing over the patient to another team. Obviously there are lots of reasons why she shouldn't herself be in the room, and she knows she shouldn't deliberately seek out more information on a grade-six infohazard situation, but - given how she was already exposed to the patient - would she be allowed to watch the treatment from her room? 

So, he can probably just go ahead and tell her this because she's surely seen enough evidence to deduce it for herself, but the problem is that the patient has almost completely unknown alternatephysics abilities and is not thought to be particularly aligned with Civilization's values. (This second part is in fact a massive euphemism; telling a healthcare worker that their patient is a true-murderer is considered a mild personal-scale infohazard of its own.)

Oh, and there's also rapidly accumulating evidence for her being PASSIVELY MIND-AFFECTING EVEN WHILE UNCONSCIOUS.

So, basically, no. They'll keep her updated, if she really wants to be (shit Merrin has probably been ensnared by the patient's ero!witch powers), but in a low-bandwidth way that probably doesn't allow Merrin to be mind-controlled at three degrees of separation.

....Aww, okay, fair enough. 

(Merrin is not picking up on the ero!witch subtext, and they aren't explicitly telling her about that specific expected mind-control.) 

Merrin would like to hear, via whatever number of degrees of separation they think is necessary, if the patient substantially deteriorates. If she stays in her current state of 'surprisingly stable and even-more-surprisingly slowly improving', they don't have to interrupt Merrin with that information. 

And then she will go to whatever room they're providing her with and, for lack of anything else to do, take a really long hot bath before she attempts sleep. 

Meanwhiler and elsewherer, in an even more secret underground installation than the one Merrin is currently in, Athpechya's precautious-sedation protocol gets overridden only a few minutes after it actually takes effect. When she wakes up she'll see Therril, the Basement's point person on Containment, who is apparently literally immune to all forms of talk-control yet invented by dath ilan and is frankly kind of scary, even to lesser Keepers.

She does not literally have a higher Will save modifier than the archdevil Dispater, but a negotiation between the two of them would, in fact, come down to the throw of the dice.

[The first part of the conversation that follows is neither writable nor interpretable by Meta-Reality, but the gist is that Athpechya's values have not been corrupted by contact with the Unknown. If anything they've actually become more aligned with Civilization's.]

"So the part that the system doesn't have an option for is that I made an agreement with one of the 'gods' who looked acceptably aligned and now have magic powers as a result."

"I assume you had a very good reason why that couldn't have waited for review."

"If I hadn't I'd now be in their infinite torture dimension because that is apparently how they do ' ' 'corrigibility' ' ' over there. Also, the goddess in question swore an Oath not to act in dath ilan until Her alignment verification had been approved by someone authorized."

"I'm authorized but first I would like someone to think for a while about the possible consequences of ever having any causal interaction with that literal flaming s-risk of a universe again—there was some debate about whether the sheer number of Exceptions you keyed in was a software malfunction."

"No, Golarion is just in fact that bad."

In that case, after a more thorough debrief of Athpechya, Therril will convene a brainstorming session on the risks of sending an intelligence-gathering party to Golarion.

Actually, urgent message: can she possibly come to the other side of the planet ASAP to help interrogate the other hostile anomaly with possible mind-control powers?

No, because there may in fact be EVEN BIGGER PROBLEMS over here. (Related problems; she isn't throwing another Exception.) They can have dath ilan's second-best talk-control-resister, though.

When Abrogail comes to, she's surrounded by a dozen armed Security, and beyond them, three Keepers.

She's not, actually, going to try to fight her way out of this.

"Can you understand me?" asks one of the Keepers.

"Yes. What the Abyss do you people want?"

She attempts a Silent Still Detect Thoughts on the Keeper speaking to her.

He has a divination-blocking helmet and also a Will save modifier of 'lol you tried'.

"To begin with we'd like to know why you murdered nine Security officers, including one in a way that prevents us from recovering his brain-soul."

"They were in my way. Was the Disintegrate a problem? I don't know how your souls work around here, but from my perspective that's just a more expensive Resurrection."

Yeah, uh. Tell us more about the whole 'Resurrection' and 'afterlives' thing. That's something Civilization values sufficiently that we might be willing to overlook the fact that you're evil about it.

And don't bullshit us about Hell. We've heard what it's like.

"I can't do Resurrections myself, that's a cleric spell.

"Hell's legitimately not that bad. I've been there myself."

(Why is Lawful Good like this even in OTHER UNIVERSES.)

Meanwhile, in a metaphorical group chat consisting of high-level Keepers modeling each other based on facial microexpressions:

[She genuinely believes the second thing.]

[We'll check it out but I think she's just insane.]

Oh, yeah, tell us about your AGREEMENT WITH AN UNALIGNED ANTI-ALIGNED SUPERINTELLIGENCE because if you don't see why that's super concerning you're possibly too stupid to live in Civilization even if you weren't evil.

"My compact with Asmodeus for the throne of Cheliax had many terms, but the only one that matters is: that He gets to have his fun, and I mine. And, frankly, I've begun to think that just winning all the time has to be no fun for Him. You don't even level that way."

We're, uh, kind of concerned about your definition of 'fun', but bookmarking that and the 'leveling' thing to come back to later: are you in fact willing to help us overthrow the Governance of Cheliax, which, as we understand it, is optimizing its population for eternal damnation? We understand you were someone of importance there.

Sure!

(This planet can obviously curb-stomp Cheliax if they want, with or without her help, but is way too fucking paladin-y to stand a chance against her irresistible schemes of corruption. If she's alive to attempt them. And then she gets to have an empire in two universes.)

We'll discuss the details of that later. In the meantime: leveling? (They really desperately need information on how the ass magic works and this sounds possibly related.)

"In Golarion, a magic-user grows in power by—using magic while at the limits of their physical and mental endurance. The prevailing theory is that being in such a state allows the body to absorb magic it would otherwise refuse to, or something like that. It's widely believed that the requisite state requires being in actual danger and is impossible to induce intentionally, even in others, without actually meaning to harm them. This is, in fact, false. It merely requires very great skill on the part of the inducer." Her tone makes it very obvious that she considers herself to have this very great skill.

Back in metaphorical Keeper group chat:

[Why is everything about today such a GIANT PILE OF TROPES?]

[Did you really expect a wizard invasion to NOT be a giant pile of tropes??]

[What are you even talking about?]

[... you do know who she landed on, right?]

[...]

[... yeah.]

[She DEFINITELY has some sort of ero powers. And I'll give you 100:1 she's a sexual-sadist.]

[Also she landed on Merrin NAKED, did the briefing mention that?]

[Well yes because she ESCAPED FROM CRYO]

[Obviously tropes always have in-universe justifications for happening]

[Unfortunately I'm not sure her home universe has heard of consent or even knows how to]

[I'm not saying to set them up on a date, just—]

[That it'll happen whether we want it to or not?]

[NO because this is NOT AN ERO-LARP]

[... are you sure?]

[Admittedly not but I would still like to register my objection to feeding Merrin to the ero!witch]

[Literally no one is suggesting that]

(Someone has pressed the ORDER button, which prevents all chat members from sending messages for ten seconds.)

When Merrin wakes, she has a message saying to go to [this location] when she's ready for her debrief.

Merrin is a little bleary. It takes even her more than one night's sleep to fully recover from a day like yesterday, because, wow, WHAT a day.

Also it's starting to sink in that she can't LEAVE, which is...mostly just surreal, rather than something she has actual emotions about. 

...ALSO she is now distracted remembering how the patient is super attractive. This...is not something Merrin normally finds distracting?? It's really baffling and feels undignified. 

She will get herself something to eat and then report to the specified location, not necessarily moving fast because she is, in fact, physically still tired after yesterday, and has an overall-pleasant-and-satisfying but definitely noticeable degree of muscle soreness. That happens when you spend an entire day climbing icy mountains, no matter how fit you are. 

They don't actually need any factual information from Merrin at this point, they got most of the incident details from the other medtechs, but they'd like to know how Merrin is feeling about the whole situation?

(In part they're looking for traces of continued mind-affecting magic, and in part for evidence on how Merrin might feel about being more involved in this situation before telling her additional secrets. Obviously, they don't tell her this yet, because her responses will be more informative that way.)

She, uh, is definitely thrown-off-balance by the unexpectedness of suddenly landing in a grade-six-infohazard type situation! Merrin systems she'll have more emotions about that later, once it's sunk in fully. Right now her emotional state is mostly....very confused, and really desperately curious? She isn't going to press if they don't think she needs to know, but she does really want to know what the supercooled waste site is going on with the patient's weird physiology. And also whether the patient is going to be okay? She's pretty invested in that? 

The patient is conscious and expected to make a full recovery; that much isn't any more secret than the whole rest of the case.

They're a little bit concerned about exposing Merrin to anything more, because she is in fact too famous to quarantine for any significant length of time; people would notice. (They know that Merrin hates hearing this but it is in fact a live concern that she needs to be tracking.) But they have, on the other hand, identified something that needs doing in this situation that Merrin is kind of implausibly perfect for? She's approved to know some of what's going on, if she's potentially interested in doing that thing. It does carry a small risk of having to be quarantined for a much longer period, though, and she would be expected to cooperate fully with anything they have to do to make her absence seem non-suspicious to the public, in addition to all the usual secrecy oaths.

Wow! Oh good Merrin is so relieved!

(She is pleased enough that the patient is recovering that she is not even particularly upset at them calling her "too famous" for something, which would normally be very aaaaaaah. Partly the entire situation is...kind of just too surreal to parse as actual reality with implications about her normal day to day life, as opposed to a weird sim, or maybe even a bizarre alternatephysics novel.) 

...She, um, maybe needs a few minutes to think about that, if she has to make a decision with literally only that information? If they think she's really well-suited for some important task here, she believes them - they have the full record of all her certs - but she is not even a little bit managing to picture what. 

Obviously there's alternatephysics involved in the thing. The existence of that isn't secret from her, since she's now seen it with her own eyes. But sure, she can have a few minutes to think.

....Huh. Merrin does a quick mental search of all the alternatephysics settings she knows about, and - nope it's still not obvious to her how her qualifications are applicable. 

On the one hand: wow Merrin cannot possibly be qualified for whatever it is they want her to do! She's not important enough for that! Aaaaah!!!

...On the other hand: she is sort of ready to explode with curiosity. And she does, in fact, kind of want a reason - an excuse, if she's entirely honest with herself - to stay involved in the situation and look at the patient's face again why is her brain DOING this.

If she would be providing something valuable for Civilization, that seems worth the potential risk of...whatever it is they're worried about that could require a much longer quarantine. Her mom would forgive her if she knew what was really going on. Also, she feels actively motivated and wants to stick around. 

Now can they tell her what the thing is? 

So, recently, Civilization made contact with a—basically you would call it a fantasy setting, though it doesn't really resemble any fantasy setting ever invented in dath ilan. The people there look human. They're still studying whether that's anything more than an appearance. (Not said to Merrin: probably if it were a fake fantasy setting created by hostile aliens to optimize over dath ilan, it would look more like dath ilani fantasy settings, and also less OBVIOUSLY EVIL.)

Also, it turns out their alternatephysics is maybe not so 'alternate', because it works fine in dath ilan. They're still studying whether it's safe, and indeed possible in general for unspecial people to learn, and a lot of things could happen that could make this proposal not work out, but. One thing they did discover is that magic users gain power by using their magic at the limits of their physical and mental endurance. And since Merrin already pushes herself to her limits as part of her regular job, and landed (kind of suspiciously?) in the middle of the situation anyway, they could in fact learn a lot at a relatively small cost, if Merrin could learn some magic so they can study the process.

....Huh. That is - weird and not what Merrin was expecting. And definitely not a cert she has. But magic powers do sound really cool and if she can get stronger magic powers by pushing herself really hard, Merrin will admit that maaaaaaybe she is unusually qualified for that. How do you start learning the magic? 

They will—get back to her on that? They just made contact yesterday and the research team they sent to figure things out just left this morning and won't be back until tomorrow morning.

- right, of course, sorry for being impatient. They can let her know when they have more to go on. 

(In the meantime Merrin will go back to her room, and be desperately curious and also kind of resentful that they aren't letting her talk to the patient.)

Meanwhile, the research team:

A Gate opens on the frozen tundra, on the outer perimeter of the Worldwound. This isn't an ideal location but it's the only location in Golarion Athpechya knew well enough to target that was not, in fact, in Cheliax. (She wasn't entirely sure that it was a real place, having only seen it in a god-induced vision, but it was worth a try.)

The team consists of Athpechya, mostly to get them there, Therril, to negotiate with Iomedae, and three mid-rank Keepers, to discover as much information about this world from as many independent sources as they can. The plan is to stay until Athpechya can get new spells to get them back, or longer if a reason to do so arises.

Their strange clothing, and the rank-insignia-circlets most of them are wearing, which kind of look like slightly exotic cognitive-enhancement headbands, will give most Golarians they encounter the impression that this is a party of high-level casters from possibly another planet.

All of them have Tongues up, thanks to Athpechya. Ideally they would wait until actually encountering people to cast it, since it will only last a little over three hours, but Athpechya is unfortunately forbidden from casting any spells in Golarion that aren't planar travel out of Golarion.

The first human life they encounter is a party of Chelish Hellknights.

—who immediately stop, and kneel as well as their armor will allow.

"Most High?" one of them ventures.

Athpechya switches on her supervillainess gendertrope, and declares ominously:

"Silence, fools. I am about our Lord's business. Begone!"

... they do be going.

"What was that about?"

"Don't ask."

Luckily, the next human life they encounter is a pair of Iomedaen paladins.

They aren't going to bother the high-level wizards from another planet without good reason to, but they do note to themselves that that one woman's clothing choices look kind of Evil.

She doesn't Detect that way, though.

"In the name of the Light, and on behalf of the Civilization of dath ilan, greetings."

These people are in fact claiming to be from another planet?! Well, in that case, the Church of Iomedae returns their greetings. (They aren't sure exactly what some of those words meant, but they sure did sound Lawful Good.)

The paladins offer to escort the ?alien wizards? back to their camp.

At the camp, another paladin, who happens to have seen a picture of the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus in Cheliax, sees the approaching party and screams at his comrades:

"What the fuck are you doing—that's Aspexia Rugatonn—"

Being completely immune to fear, and not particularly Wise, he draws his sword and charges.

"Detect Alignment on me before you do something stupid."

"She's not Evil," confirms the paladin who Detected that earlier.

     "I'm pretty sure a ninth-circle cleric has lots of ways of faking that."

"... ask Iomedae? This situation is likely even more bizarre than it looks to you."

They are, eventually, able to find a fifth-circle cleric whom Iomedae has warned to expect a cleric of Hers from another universe who looks exactly like Aspexia Rugatonn.

     "... what?"

Look, I have no idea either.

Anyway, we're here from another world with much better technology than yours but no (existing knowledge of) magic, and we've heard that your world has kind of a lot of problems that we'd like to help fix.

Uh...yes please?

We've had previous dealings with Iomedae but we need to ascertain more thoroughly that She's actually aligned with our Civilization's values. How do we talk to Her?

Prayer works like this.

It takes about two seconds of Therril thinking about what Civilization is going to do to this universe's stupid flaming infinite torture dimension to get Iomedae's attention.

[Incomprehensible alignment verification stuff.]

Iomedae is approved to act within dath ilan's predesignated Alien Containment Zone, a currently unpopulated hundred-mile radius centered on [this point], this being the limit of anyone's preexisting Exceptional authorization. Getting Her access to the rest of the planet will require a vote of the Nine Legislators.

Her prior agreement with Athpechya included some unlikely-conditionals about being able to oppose Asmodeus in dath ilan if the need arises and dath ilan's Lawful processes are not functioning, conditionals She is not going to relinquish, but She would like to expand them to cover the other Evil gods of Golarion's universe as well.

There are OTHER evil gods.

That's also going to have to be put to a vote, but in the event that the Legislature stops functioning on account of evil gods before they can do that (unlikely: it will only take five minutes once they get back to dath ilan and their systems are very resilient), sure, she confidently predicts that Civilization would retroactively appreciate Iomedae's help in that case.

Also, after renegotiating some things with the other gods, she's revising Athpechya's status: she is now a fourth-circle cleric with the additional ability to cast up to three Gates between Golarion's universe and dath ilan per day. Her previous oath not to cast spells in Golarion is null and void. She still has the first- through fourth-circle spells she chose during her original trip to Golarion but she has used up all of her Gates for today.

Iomedae will choose higher-level clerics in dath ilan later, but Athpechya is not, actually, particularly aligned with Her values for a dath ilani.

Yeah, valid.

Anyway, this is also an intelligence-gathering mission for them, so how would they go about buying transportation to the largest library on this planet, and also more translation spells?

They have a fifth-circle wizard in this camp who can Teleport them back to Lastwall, and from there they can get a Greater Teleport to Absalom or wherever else they'd like to go. The Temple of the All-Seeing Eye in Osirion is probably the best library on the planet, but, uh, if they're this cautious about gods they may not want to interact with Nethys. Also if they plan to visit Cheliax they should be warned about Malediction—

After this many updates in the same direction one should in fact meta-update so that the next update is less surprising, but, uh, that series does not appear to be converging to a finite amount of badness.

Meanwhile in acausal group chat:

[Registering a preliminary preference for just nuking this entire continuum of Reality]

[Seconded, but: how?]

[My current median estimate for the number of gigantic flaming x-risks on this planet is currently in the thousands]

[Objection: it's still here]

[I know. It doesn't make sense]

[Why doesn't Iomedae—]

[Presumably She thinks it's fixable]

[Or She can't]

[Thousands of sealed x-risks and a god can't let any of them out?]

[No, I mean: if She were the sort of entity who would, She wouldn't exist]

[It's obvious if you understand decision theory]

[I do understand decision theory and I'm beginning to regret it]

Later, in the Grand Library of Absalom:

What?

What?

WHAT???

... no.

Literally HOW.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Is this entire planet completely insane or possibly just very stupid?

You know, we can test this.

She asks the seventh-circle Iomedaen wizard serving as their Teleport monkey to Detect her Intelligence, this being a thing that magic can apparently just DO.

(Based on the average inferred 'Wisdom' of this planet, she estimates approximately no risk of failing her 'Will save' against 'Detect Thoughts', given that it's a live concern for people here at all, but just in case she is also not having any Thoughts.)

Uh, sure?

26.

WHAT.

"What the fuck kind of headband is that?" he asks, pointing at her Keeper rank-insignia-circlet.

Wait.

You have HEADBANDS that MAKE YOU SMARTER???

(And your books are STILL like this?)

That ISN'T a headband? In that case, you're, uh, eight standard deviations above median, which he knows enough about probability to know is approximately not a thing.

Therril is one of the hundred smartest people in dath ilan, at a level where intelligence tests do not really produce well-ordered results because there's no one smart enough to design sufficiently powerful tests—and neither is dath ilan's true thinkoomph distribution quite quadratic-exponential, generations of Basement-specific heritage-optimization for the absolute smartest people having made the upper tail significantly fatter than the lower one—but +8SD is not a thing there either. Even less so, eight Golarion standard deviations, given the observed lack of a society-wide heritage-optimization program here and what that implies about the amount of variance in various population observables relative to dath ilan.

Her modal estimate is that the supposedly median Intelligence score of "10" (assuming this number actually measures any significant component of thinkoomph, which obviously deserves testing) corresponds to four standard deviations below median in dath ilan. This is, actually, much less of a surprise to her than it would be to an ordinary dath ilani without access to counterfactual-models of what dath ilan would be like if Civilization had never done any heritage-optimization—it's worse than those models predict, but only a little bit worse. Maybe this planet is just slightly below the intelligence threshold required to coordinate enough to start doing heritage-optimization without it turning into a giant superheated disaster, or maybe they're just too busy individually responding to everything else on this planet that's already a giant superheated disaster to have ever had the metaphorical five seconds of slack they would need to establish good coordination mechanisms.

(The fact that everything is a giant disaster would normally make heritage-optimization for intelligence that much more important to the continued survival of this planet, but apparently they just have MAGIC for that.)

Okay. And what about her Wisdom?

(The wizard would not in fact have noticed a significant pause in the conversation, because, INT 26.)

They could go get a scroll of Detect Anxieties but he's kind of afraid that, as his own Wisdom is not magically enhanced, casting it on her will actually mildly hurt him, this being the sort of thing known to happen to people who ill-advisedly cast mental divinations on, like, high-level archons and such.

Yeah, you know what, she can infer the information she wants within pretty narrow bounds and doesn't want to know the actual answer anyway at her level, all information is worth having, but it is not in fact worth interrupting their other research to know right now.

Does anyone happen to know if 'diamonds' are combustible? (This being an experiment that would distinguish the leading hypothesis for their chemical nature from most of the others.)

Why the literal fuck would anyone do that?

Because if they're literally just tetrahedral Element-6 crystals, there's a synthesis process that we wouldn't normally have expected a society at your tech level to have discovered but in your case we thought maybe SOMEONE with an INTELLIGENCE HEADBAND would have TRIED given that they can RESURRECT THE DEAD.

They're going to buy a 'diamond' for testing, and if their theory is correct, they're going to place an order when they get home and come back in a few weeks with a hundred million 'True Resurrection' grade diamonds and donate them to any Good or Neutral church that swears to use them for resurrecting people thought to be in Hell.

OK, but well before that point the number of clerics is the limiting factor. Iomedae would create millions of ninth-circle clerics if she had a hundred million diamonds and she could, but she in fact cannot.

What about wizards? They presumably don't all draw their power from the same large entity.

... no, but wizards can't cast Resurrection. You can replicate it with Wish, but that's an even higher-circle spell and it takes two to replicate True Resurrection. Also it requires bigger diamonds, not that that seems to be a problem for you.

And ninth-circle wizards are rare, even more so than ninth-circle clerics, because becoming a ninth-circle wizard is dangerous.

Yeah. About that. First of all, gaining power by killing monsters is a stupid excuse for a ~~~~~. Second, does the power actually come from the monsters?

No, it's thought to be a mental state thing, but it does require genuine danger as far as we know.

Cheliax trains its entire eligible population to be wizards and then sends them all to the Worldwound, where half of them die and go to Hell but the other half end up third or fourth circle. No other country has nearly that many wizards at that level, which is the main reason no one has overthrown them yet.

Yeah, Cheliax can die in a fire but actually quite possibly we should fix the Worldwound thing first, as soon as we've figured out how to cheat at magic.

(Cheating is technique.)

(Agreed.)

They stop in a shop in Absalom and buy samples of 'diamonds' and 'spellsilver'. They'll be back later, when they can bring more gold, for an assortment of magic items (most notably, a headband of each mental stat), initially for testing.

(They do have gold, it being one of their top five guesses for what a society without the computing or social technology to do their accounting in metaphorical labor-hours might use as currency. The shopkeeper is baffled by the ingots but they are, in fact, made of Element-79.)

And then they can head back to Vigil, spend the night, spend most of the next day meeting with Lastwall's Governance, and then head back to dath ilan, the seventh-circle wizard who's been Teleporting them around and otherwise serving as their guide to Golarion in tow as an ambassador of sorts.

Their report to Exception Handling HQ includes the following requests:

1. One million tetrahedral Element-6 crystals of at least [this size].
2. One ton of any of Elements 57 through 71, it apparently not mattering which element specifically.
3. Ten endurance-focused Exception Handling personnel whose jobs involve facing some degree of real personal danger, who are cleared to swear high-grade secrecy oaths and willing to volunteer for an important mission potentially involving [various rather underspecified dangers].

??????????

You want to do WHAT to my best oppers??

... if you're going to be using my people for your weird-ass alien experiments, could you at least get Merrin one of those so-called 'intelligence headbands'?

It turns out that about two hours in a top-secret installation, forbidden to talk to anyone outside of it, is enough to make Merrin EXTREMELY SUPERHEATED BORED. Even the day after an intense sim-turned-definitely-not-a-sim like yesterday, Merrin is not so much used to downtime, per se. 

...Do they have a sim room here? Presumably they can't let her go do ridiculous outdoor rescues, but she can do ICU sims in the standard setup. Uh. If they can get access to some of the special libraries because honestly she has been through just about everything in the normal libraries at least once, and the really long interesting ones multiple times. 

The facility absolutely didn't have the sim equipment for a hospital Complicated Patient Intake Room setup yesterday. But it was pretty high up there among the predictions of what Merrin would ask for, and compared to the scale of this whole operation, it's really not a major expense to rush that setup so it's there by the time she's rested enough to ask for it. 

(Of course, no one is going to mention to Merrin that the room hasn't just always been here.) 

Given the fact that she's already quarantined for exposure to a grade-six infohazard, and is in fact pre-cleared to swear high-grade secrecy oaths, which they are planning to ask her to do for an even higher-stakes mission, it...seems fine to give her access to most of the secret library of Weird Exception Handling Medical Sims with minimal obfuscation. 

Does Merrin want to solo running an ICU on an "underground Moon base" with some casualties of an unspecified industrial accident? Does she want to triage and treat the victims of an unspecified bioattack? Does she want to run an "ICU" sim with three patients of varying levels of acuity in which she also cannot use literally any computer tech? (The last one can be run solo but doesn't have to be; Merrin can have some of her teammates on it, if they also feel like running horrible sims.) 

(Merrin's teammates mostly don't feel like running horrible sims, actually.) 

The no-computer-tech-ICU one is MEAN and UNFAIR and it lasts eight hours (...it's an extended version of the standard 4-hour sim, for Merrin specifically).

On the first run, literally none of Merrin's simulated patients survive! It's intensely frustrating! She has 'alternate fallback medical equipment' but she is learning how it works on the fly and also how non-computerized ICU equipment works is 'terribly', running vasopressors by gravity gives her panic attacks. Merrin is pretty sure that the only way she can possibly get through this sim is to coach her one conscious simulated-patient (played by an actor from the onsite team) on how to monitor her other patients. 

Merrin is going to run the full sim every day and spend her "downtime" on notes and prep and frantic research on reconstructions of pre-technological medicine. This is literally even meaner than her worst low-resource solo wilderness rescues, which mostly didn't give her critically ill or injured patients who wouldn't survive without ICU-level support, and, when they did, generally left her with at least comms tech! This wouldn't come up even for an EMP blast, some of the Exception Handling medical tech is specifically supposed to be shielded against that! 

Merrin has a PERSONAL GRUDGE against this sim, but if they give her three runs on it, she'll probably get to the point where she can consistently save one of her patients and at least manage successful cryo on the two who 'die'. 

(The vast majority of people who run this sim at all already have the context on why it might ever come up, and most of the rest figure it out somewhere in the process, especially if they do it more than once. There's a brief discussion on telling Merrin, but there is, actually, a preexisting policy on this: she'll be read in as soon as she has a need to know, and no sooner.)

Instead, shortly before she's due to start her third run, she gets a message saying that it is instead time for MAGIC TRAINING and could she please report to this location?

Aww, she had a whole new plan for this run! 

(Merrin honestly has more than enough hints by now that someone with the average thinkoomph of the “works for Exception Handling” pool, or even just has closer to the usual level of dath ilani curiosity and tendency to poke at puzzles, would either already have a background hypothesis or would have guessed in the first five minutes. But dath ilan doesn't exactly encourage poking at questions that might have infohazardous answers, and for someone like Merrin who has rather more innate 'tendency to obey authority', at least in the aspect of herself she inhabits while at work, that cognitive habit is sticky. She would understand, too, if she finds out later why they didn't tell her.) 

Magic training is neat too, though! Merrin will report to the location given! 

When she gets there, the room is empty except for the Keeper who's been interfacing with her for the past few days.

"The others will be here shortly," he says, "but there's something I wished to discuss with you first."

He points out a silver circlet-like object on the table beside him. (It is fairly obviously not a Keeper's circlet.) "This is a conceptualmagic artifact which enhances certain aspects of thinkoomph by an estimated 1.3 standarddeviations. It has been tested and appears to be quite safe, although we expect that extended use will make it unpleasant to remove. You do not have to use it if you don't want, but your superiors in Exception Handling insisted we make the offer."

Merrin stares at him. 

“That’s a thing?” 

There are probably Implications of that, to do with - whatever is going on with the other fantasy-setting world that has the alien magic - and she sort of doubts that, overall, they are comfortable implications.

Also she has weird feelings about it!

...She isn’t sure what exactly her feelings are. That...is apparently going to take some inconvenient introspection to figure out. 

"- Sorry, right. I, um, I'm - going to think about it for a minute or two." 

What are her weird feelings??? 

Well.

So the obvious thing is that her superiors think (reasonably, and correctly) that Merrin isn't smart enough for - whatever is ahead of them, here. She should - actually think about the details of what they told her, at some point?

(She sure does keep doing a mental blank around the details. She should at least try to recall the conversation that she had while still - if not exhausted, at least while her motivation system was still mostly calibrated to the life-or-death, second-by-second intensity of an intense sim that had suddenly become an even-more-intense not-sim...)

...A fantasy setting, but - an alien one, not something that dath ilani fantasy authors would actually write. One with basically-human-appearing inhabitants - though those initial appearances may be deceptive, both from fantasy tropes and given how Merrin's superiors directly specified that further information was pending...

Their alternatephysics apparently somehow literally work here, in the actual physical world that Merrin has spent her whole life in? She...had probably been given enough bits of information earlier to notice that, and a little after was directly informed of it, but - maybe had not quite internalized, before now, just how weird that is??

And they want her, specifically, working on this. Despite her general mediocrity at most things. But it makes sense, because– because gaining power within the other world's magic system more-or-less relies on someone pushing themselves to the limits of their endurance, whether mental or physical? And thanks to Merrin's current job, she already has lots of practice at the relevant mental motions -

- and also she happened to land nearby and is thereby already information-quarantined, so it's not like it costs them much, they can't assign her to anything else until this (whatever it is) is over, so the opportunity cost is low....

What if they could instead pick someone ELSE for this job, someone SMARTER and BETTER who could thereby obviously get even more benefit from the thinkoomph-enhancing magic they want to offer her

...Merrin does, in fact, have enough faith in Civilization to trust that they would have noticed if they had a better option.

- wow okay thinking about the fact that Civilization apparently doesn't have a better option is somehow an even worse thought what if instead she stops that and tries to do her job. 

Well. Clearly the situation is very high stakes, and - if they think Merrin is among the people who should be working on it then they're desperate - and that means the current state of things is pretty bad and scary and Merrin does not, in fact, super want to deal with that while still stupid. 

(Not that the offer they're making her will get her as far as "smart". But it will at least be an incremental improvement.) 

(Merrin is on some level aware that there are as many as several wrongthoughts in that whole chain, but see, it's a long complicated chain, and someone is asking her to make a decision right now, and her Exception Handling instincts point toward it being very rarely useful to go introspect on all of your stupid emotions before answering a straightforward question.) 

Merrin cannot manage an honest smile and this context, unlike the "treating very delirious patients" context, is not a good time to try a vaguely-dishonest smile, and so she doesn't. 

"...I think that makes a lot of sense." 

Merrin reaches out to pick up the circlet. 

(She isn't not freaking out about it, but Merrin has a lot of practice at handling internal panic and keeping it purely internal and epiphenomenal to most of her actual functioning and decisions and actions.) 

(Whether or not Merrin can have her internal freakout and keep it internal, it is presumably pretty obvious to the Keeper watching her.) 

Merrin looks at the circlet in her hands, and...hesitates, because this is still pretty scary actually. 

Is Merrin hesitating because of the actual dangers of cognitive enhancement, or for some weird Merrin reason? Probably some weird Merrin reason. (His judgment is that Merrin, who has spent most of her life trying to track thoughts just a little too big for her, will in fact feel more rather than less like herself at this level of enhancement.)

"You aren't the only person to receive one of these," he says. "Most of Civilization's top researchers are in fact receiving a version several times more powerful, which requires special Keeper training to even put on safely.

"... in general, Civilization tries not to place people where their ability to do their jobs would benefit too much from this kind of enhancement," he continues, "not that it was a possibility until recently. It's true that normally, if we need a smarter person to do a job, we simply hire a smarter person. You, however, were chosen for qualities much rarer than the requisite level of general intelligence to be an Exception Handling medtech, and yet it remains true that you would do better in your current role if those requisites were met rather than not met.

"You do not have to. You have been doing quite adequately" really better than adequately, but Merrin "without it. It is, however, our judgment that both you and Civilization would benefit from you wearing it."