Maybe! They can find out! 

…On reflection Merrin does not really trust Laeirthe to handle this. For one it’ll - sound super weird, might make Estha more alarmed about mind control - and also Laeirthe might say something incredibly rude.

She is not eight anymore. She’s a grown adult and she can handle her own agonizingly awkward social situations.

She looks up and meets Estha’s eyes, and speaks with as much dignity as she can manage.

“I don’t think it’s going to work. I - might have been Mariona in my past, though I think the relationship between us might be something weirder than that, but either way I’m not her now. …I’m sorry. That you lost her. But I can’t pretend to be her, it’s not going to work.”

She’s being so apologetic about it, look, don’t be mad at her, none of this is her fault 

Merrin is fully aware that Estha might be angry anyway, and - that she doesn’t know what he might do, when she’s offended him and he’s not trying to be unsuspicious to a dath ilani. But there’s no possible route, here, where she can avoid that confrontation forever, and so she might as well be emotionally mature about it.

There is actual panic that rises in Esta, then, though it doesn't show on his face, for it is very very far from the first time that Esta has had cause to panic.

He considers what forces might be applied to Mariona, but there's a problem; which is that this version of her is a masochist when it comes to lesser pain, and when it comes to greater pain she has only a commoner's vitality such that even Inflict Light Wounds would slay her on the spot.  Did Asmodeus grant him spells about it, he could resort to torture, but not easily otherwise; and he will not use his only Heal without knowing it will be replaced.

Because the other thing is -- as you don't quite make 6th-circle without knowing at least in principle -- there is such a thing as torture not helping.  There has to be some sort of aqueduct going from the Pain Lake to the Results Farm.

Esta stands up, as if angry, turns her back to her, as if angry, takes a few deep breaths, as if controlling anger.  His fingers twitch, and he mutters something under his breath that is not in any language she's been given.

Then he turns back.  "You do not particularly give the impression that you actually TRIED doing what I told you to do.  Evaluate your memories without fear or favor, seeking the truth there whatever it may be, and then put your entire effort into making your Will save."

(His 3rd-circle domain spell could be Dispel Magic, given Esta's two domains of Arcane and Devil, but he has so little use for Dispel Magic that it is instead Suggestion and has been this whole time.)

Oh. Maybe she didn’t actually try as hard as she possibly could. You know, because of the part where she was kind of scared of turning back into the Merrin - Mariona - who can be convinced to work for a TORTURE GOD via SOCIAL PRESSURE.

(It hasn’t really explicitly occurred to Merrin that Mariona could have been convinced via, you know, the threat of - or the actuality of - torture. Merrin may have character weaknesses but she knows that the Algorithm does not include responding to THAT kind of threat.) 

But that’s silly, because the truth is already true, whatever it is, it’s what’s there to be interacted with. Obviously she needs to assess her memories with as little bias as she can manage and then try to fight the mind control that (might be) making her believe falsehoods! 

Think - what were the points he made about dath ilan, can she hold those up beside her memories and this time do it without clinging to any particular conclusion or being afraid of what she might realize - of course Estha was right to point out that she can’t be sure until she’s really actually tried to do that -

Um?

What. She’s busy.

Something weird is going on and Laeirthe thinks that it might, maybe, be more than just Merrin’s deep-rooted instinct to defer to authority figures, though that - and her somewhat absurd desire to put off the social conflict longer - probably makes her easier to push around. But how sure is she that her current motivation is actually hers? Come on, think about what’s true, without being afraid of whether it’ll result in even more negative character judgements of Evil Estha…

(It’s perhaps not, in general, a very good idea to attempt a Suggestion on a dath ilani with her Wisdom currently augmented to 24, but it’s downright stupid to attempt on a dath ilani whose brain is also running the simulated echo of an extremely paranoid immortal mage from an alternatephysics setting where subtle and hard-to-detect mind control is frequently plot-relevant. It’s not that Laeirthe is entirely unaffected, even, he shares the cognitive substrate, he just - comes with pre-installed bonuses to noticing a different set of observations than the ones Merrin is most easily nudged toward.)

WOW WHAT THE RADIOACTIVE TOILET PAPER 

YES ONE OF THE THINGS MERRIN WANTS TO KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT WITHOUT FAVOR OR FEAR IS WHETHER ESTHA JUST USED MIND CONTROL TO TRY TO MAKE HER WORK FOR ASMODEUS AGAIN 

IF MERRIN TRIES REALLY REALLY REALLY HARD CAN SHE MAKE HER WILL SAVE WHATEVER THAT EVEN IS

3rd-level spell, cast by a cleric now with WIS 18.  DC = 10 + 3 + 4 = 17.

Creation previously decided that your sort-of-class gives you a base Will save of +3, and your WIS 24 gives you +7.  We'll take off -1 for how the Suggestion is very reasonable.

(1d20 = 9) + 10 - 1 = 18.  You shake off the Suggestion!

(That said, WIS 24 might help you notice that Esta did just Suggest you think carefully and try hard to make your Will save.  You didn't feel any impulse about going to work for Asmodeus!  That would have been an 'obviously harmful act' rather than a 'reasonable Suggestion'.)

(Also to be clear, Creation has only rolled the one Will save here, to describe this whole process.  This is more like a 'choose which headmate rolls the Will save' situation than 'all your headmates get to roll separate Will saves and you can take the best one'.)

Merrin does not actually know anything about how Suggestion works or what its limitations are! For all she knows the mind control effect he was going for was totally unrelated to any content of what he said and once in place and unremarked-on by her would let him steer her around in arbitrary directions!

…She does observe, after the fact, that the effect on her thoughts that she actually observed wasn’t necessarily hostile? Honestly, if he has ASKED PERMISSION to try something that might retrieve her memories if they exist, she might have been fine with it! She’s spooked about it because he didn’t, but - if he wasn’t Evil, she would prooobably be advancing the more charitable hypothesis that it doesn’t work if the target is expecting it.

It’s skeevy behavior, but it’s really not a further update on Estha’s character, yeah, they know or can infer that he’s done much more egregious things.

In this particular case it’s arguably helpful because now they know what a Will save feels like.

Try together, both of them, to do that exact motion against the mind control that an Outer God might have placed on them? Which, if it exists, is a LOT more egregious and horrifying? 

YEAH MERRIN MAY BE MOTIVATED ON A MORE VISCERAL LEVEL NOW AND WILL TRY TO SEE THROUGH ALL ILLUSIONS VERY VERY VERY HARD

(She’s going to have to introspect later on why that bothered her quite as much as it did. It doesn’t seem like it necessary should have. But right now, being affected and almost angry about it might be useful motivation.)

Either your Will save failed miserably against the DC of an Outer God, or, alternatively, there wasn't anything there to save against.

Merrin looks up at Estha again. She's trying to control her expression in the sense of, like, maintaining the level of basic dignity that she would if she were at work in front of a lot of Very Serious People, she's not going to be unprofessionally visibly emotional at him, but she doubts she can hide all of her reaction from Estha and she's not really wasting effort on that. 

"I think I made my Will save against whatever you did just now," she says levelly. "I tried against the hypothetical Outer God illusion and it didn't do anything." 

"I would have hoped that loaning you the Wisdom to see the Suggestion would have made you Wise enough to let it do its work... well, I suppose it may have been worth it, from your perspective, to learn the motion of making a Will save...  I have been thinking too slowly, through all of this, from the very beginning, and should've given you something else to save against."

"I don't know what we do from here."

Well you could actually TRY TO THINK OF SOMETHING.

Yeah, that wasn't a very dath ilani thing to say.  'I haven't thought of anything yet' or 'My first half-second of thought didn't produce anything', maybe.  Putting it this way makes you sound like the kind of mortal that Asmodeanism preaches mortals are, and that's not how dath ilani try to sound to each other.

Maybe if he had told her what he was doing so she wasn't caught totally off guard and paranoid that it might be a lot worse than it seemed on the surface– no point arguing about it now. Or, maybe nonzero point, culture gap unshared assumptions all that, but right now Merrin really isn't in the mood and she's going to treat that feeling like it might be meaningful and not ram past it. 

"I had a different hypothesis about the - mechanism - of the whole situation and I don't think any of the new information you brought up necessarily refutes it," she says. "I'm not actually sure what it implies, in terms of what the Outer God wants us to do, but if we're both thinking about it we might be able to come up with guesses. ...It's high context so it's going to be easiest to explain now while you still have Baseline." 

Trying very hard to disbelieve everything she believes in case it's an illusion and a lie has left Merrin feeling a bit...floaty, which the enhanced Wisdom is flagging for her. Well, it seems to be covering her on the "not freaking out and being incredibly upset about Hell" front, for the moment, and it's not obviously impairing her ability to, like, reason logically, and it's recognizably related to some mind-states she can get into after different...extreme experiences...of various kinds. Merrin is inclined to let her brain keep doing it for the moment. 

"I am listening."  He would demand his headband back, but it seems to perhaps be in use.

Great! Then Merrin will try to figure out in what order she needs to go to concisely explain all of the concepts that make "analogous in some way I don't fully understand to an alternate-universe fanfiction crossover plot" make any sense whatsoever as a phrase. 

The headband is really helpful but mostly because it gives her a bunch of mental bandwidth to wrangle how mortifying it is to be seriously explaining something this silly. Yes Merrin is aware that feeling self-conscious and embarrassed about sounding stupid is by FAR not the most significant problem here. Her brain is silly like that, she knows that.

"So in dath ilan there are fictional stories, right," she says. That can't be an entirely new concept, surely, his world has to have that. "Some of them are set in a world that looks basically like dath ilan, but a lot of them are in alternatephysics fictional settings that have magic. There are thousands of original settings, but patterns show up..." 

Merrin will be pretty brief about alternatephysics tropes but she is pretty curious how trope-y Golarion will sound, to her, once Estha finally gets around to explaining slightly more facts about it. The parts he has explained are not recognizable tropes to Merrin but, like, if someone did write a setting like that for some reason it would absolutely be in the Ill-Advised Goods store because it's super upsetting, and Merrin would not have incidentally come across it...

"- and sometimes if a set of characters are very popular, the same or a different author will sometimes take the people from one story, and write an alternate version where their whole lives took place in a completely different setting. If it's a very different setting there are sometimes pretty big divergences, but they're still in some sense the same characters, and at least one of the common trope-versions has them having recognizably similar relationships with other characters..." 

Huh, Merrin thinks the headband is somehow directly making her better at explaining in a way that feels generalized - she's not bad at it, it's relevant to her work, but it feels like if she had to get up in front of a crowd of bystanders in an Exception Handling emergency sim and direct them, she would be better at that, too... 

Merrin's enhanced Wisdom is also pointing out that she has not, yet, explicitly informed Estha in so many words that Hell and Asmodeus and the whole being-Evil-on-purpose thing and frankly nearly everything she knows about his world is horrifying according to her values, which she does not at this point anticipate changing in response to external pressure. Maybe when she was eight! You could corner a Merrin into an awful lot of things when she was eight! But whatever the exact mechanism and history, Merrin-as-she-is-now experienced growing up in dath ilan, and the adult Merrin at the end of that is just - no.

She's not, yet, sure if or how she can find the courage in herself to be a protagonist about it, rather than just being quietly grateful that she's stuck indefinitely on this rock in space where she cannot affect anything in Golarion so it cannot possibly be her problem. But she's not going to actively work for the god of torturing people who don't want to be tortured! Because that's bad! It's not complicated! 

(Her enhanced Wisdom points out that they might, in fact, still get scooped up by Estha's executive, which Merrin now thinks would be EXTREMELY BAD FOR EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS TO HER. There's also not a huge amount she can do to affect it, aside from...tropes stuff, maybe...which she's trying to address by brainstorming with a second person even if that person is EVIL.) 

...It's inevitably going to come up at some point, Merrin concludes, she can't hide indefinitely that she's horrified about it, but it's going to introduce complications and he might get really mad and they have limited time on the Baseline-translation spell, which he might not get another of, so it makes sense to prioritize explaining high-context stuff where Baseline has much better vocabulary. 

"I wouldn't particularly expect imaginary magic invented by a world with no magic to end up as plausible Spellcraft.  I suppose the Outer God could've encoded a hint into your dreamworld's fiction... except for the part where taking this hypothesis on your own terms, dath ilan is not a dreamworld, and is instead a real nonmagical world whose fiction is taking utter shots in the dark with no experience of actual magic's laws."

"It doesn't sound like any spell I can remember hearing about.  It wouldn't stabilize at merely 8th circle, that's for sure.  Maybe very very distantly, it sounds like a warning I got at 5th-circle about why our Church tries to avoid conflict with the High Priest of Nethys unless we have enough of an overwhelming advantage to win across all possibilities.  But even Nefreti Clepati can't directly pull alternate versions of adventurers into our own world... or if she can, I don't know about it... and Nethys is probably the closest thing to an Outer God in nature, if not in power, among the deities short of Pharasma."

"False memories is frankly the lower-circle explanation.  But I suppose that isn't actually decisive, when we're considering an Outer God that bothered to throw us onto another planet in the first place."

"What would this theory say about the way you got here?"

"And what possibilities or rules does it suggest about how we might get out?  Or -- what happened to the original Mariona, if you're not her?"

"...The way I got here felt blatantly like a fiction trope," Merrin says. "Admittedly a lazy one. ...I don't think I follow why the false memories one seems obviously lower-intervention to you? The theory I'm positing is...I don't know, just that there's a Larger Reality that isn't just one planet or even one universe, and the direct intervention here was the Outer God moving pieces around in it, which seems smaller and less complex than - whatever it would take to edit Mariona's brain thoroughly enough to overwrite all of her memories with different ones, and also providing her with made-up technology that actually works."

Pause. "- We should do the physics experiments, if that would be meaningful evidence for you. I'm very sure that my technology is made of parts and I understand how it works even if I don't have the specializedfacilities to make it, and - I don't think anything you said earlier was a strong update for me that dath ilan can't be real."

Honestly Golarion is LESS BELIEVABLE because WHY DO PEOPLE WORK FOR THE EVIL TORTURE GOD, like, Merrin can kind of see how one would set that up with a very contrived set of incentives but it would require that, just like how Laeirthe's original setting required several million words of backstory on how, exactly, it could be in equilibrium with all of its intractable problems... 

"- I don't know what happened to the original Mariona under my theory. I guess she might have ended up somewhere with the Estha I know from dath ilan, that would be super tropey, I'm - not even sure how that would go, I don't feel like I have a great handle on her and her divergences from me -"

Is it horribly depressing it might be horribly depressing. Focus. "...The possibilities for getting out are - hmm - if this were a story written under dath ilan's conventions I think it would have to be something we could have done all along but weren't able to think of before when we were hiding a lot of information from each other, but if we actually try to work together and combine all of our knowledge and resources there's still a way?" 

Mrghhhhhhhh and now it's relevant to the planning that Merrin does not actually have any intention of working together with Estha if he's planning to take her back to Golarion and somehow try to coerce her into working for Asmodeus! She cannot actually avoid ever having that conversation and given that she has to have it, it would really be much better to have it before Estha demands his cognitive-enhancement headband back. Merrin is kinda sorta mostly coping on an emotional level with the Stuff, right now, at least in the sense that she can calmly have a conversation, and she does not really expect that to stick without the enhancement. 

Merrin pauses to see if Estha has anything more to add or ask about here, but it's rather obvious from her face that there's something she's thinking and not saying yet.