"You can't possibly mean that we were placed here to [level] us; there's nothing here for us to fight.  What do you mean?"

To what them? …Oh, the translation spell has the answer. That’s kind of a reasonable culture-gap misunderstanding of the concept, mapping it to a narrower thing, but - no. 

Merrin doesn’t know how to cross this gulf.

She can’t do this 

The Outer God should have picked a better protagonist for its games

(“I need a moment, I’m considering how to explain it,” she says, to buy herself a few more seconds to think.)

What, exactly, is Merrin scared of that she’s finding paralyzing, right now? That if she says it with insufficiently social gracefulness, Estha will torture her and it won’t be fun at all? That he’ll kill her? 

…Those would be very reasonable things to be terrified of, yes.

However, that isn’t what Merrin’s brain is actually doing. Those are scary possibilities the way that jumping out of a plane is scary (or was the first time, at least, Merrin’s brain is actually quite good at updating on whether it’s appropriate or helpful to be scared of physical dangers that might hurt.)

She’s scared of….losing the relationship? Saying something that makes alternate-Estha feel - something - betrayed? angry? hurt - and it being irrecoverable from there. 

Also maybe a bit that there’s some perfect optimal thing to say that would get him to realize that working for an Evil god is actually bad, but that any slightly suboptimal thing will instead just make him unwilling to listen to future arguments from her and so she Only Has One Chance.

It does not, to Laeirthe, really seem like she has the “relationship” she’s so afraid of “losing”. 

…Yeah. Maybe not. Merrin is actually pretty sure that alternate-Estha…cares a lot, in some sense, about his Mariona. But whatever relationship they had is PROBABLY EXTREMELY HORRIFYING and also Merrin is not Mariona. Even if she used to be once. 

(Wow. She’s finding herself kind of clinging to the hypothesis where she and Mariona do exist separately. It’s really sad to think that Estha might never be able to get his person back even if they win. But ‘it would be really sad if that were true’ is not actually a reason to privilege the hypotheses where it’s not true. Stop that, Merrin’s brain.)

Yeah. Sometimes Reality is very bad and not the way she wants it to be. It’s still what’s there to be interacted with.

…Alternate-Estha is pretty hard for Merrin to read - it’s probably the background in a Doomworld Timeline - but she’s pretty enhanced right now, she could try seeing if she can get a read on what sort of emotional state he’s in right now, in case that helps her know what to say? 

(Also, she should TELL HIM with WORDS that she’s going to be really upset about all of the everything as soon as she gives back the headband. It’s relevant information.)

(But that’s really embarrassing to admit that continues to be a very silly element of the situation for Merrin’s brain to be fixating on, and Laeirthe probably has a good point.)

…Can she get any kind of read on alternate-Estha’s current state, if she tries really hard? Merrin is not actually bad at this, and she feels like she should be able to compensate better for the culture gap now that she knows slightly more facts about the HORRIFYING DOOMWORLD BACKSTORY.

He reads as controlled, deliberate, constantly choosing what to show.  Cheliax doesn't particularly mind that aspect of Cheliax being visible; it is high-status.

He reads as concerned and focused, worried for himself and her, because Esta is, for reasons of Cultural Adaptation, choosing to show much more emotional information than he usually would.

If a +4 Splendour headband were enough to let people read Esta involuntarily past his Bluff, he'd be dead and worse than dead long since in the fucking Palace in Egorian, literally the most socially hostile environment on the surface of fucking Golarion.  Who the fuck does Merrin think she is, trying to read any aspect of Esta he is not showing her on purpose.

Yeah no it still feels a bit like trying to look through a brick wall. That makes sense. Merrin has not really had any reason in the past to try to learn to pick up what people were feeling if they did not want her to see it, except in the rather easy-mode case of, like, delirious ICU patients. 

She should not assume she has any feedback loop to steer from, once she starts talking. She probably won’t be able to tell if he’s taking it well or poorly. All she has is her pre-existing model of him, which is: her Estha if someone had written an alternate-universe version of him from the TORTURE GOD DOOM TIMELINE (why?????), plus some bits and pieces and hints from the word-connotations of the language he shared with her, plus whatever vague implicit impressions her social-modeling cognitive functions have managed to absorb over a month of working with him.

Which isn’t nothing, she doesn’t think, just - how does she turn it into a script to say that isn’t agonizingly awkward her brain really needs to stop trying to set that bar as a success criterion, it’s probably literally impossible to tell someone who currently (thinks he?) wants to be Evil, that you think being Evil is bad and he should stop, and also why would one even prioritize that in the first place.

Honestly, Laeirthe thinks that while the situation is obviously high-stakes and Merrin’s brain is correctly noting that, it’s - not obvious that treating her exact word choice as high-stakes is either helpful or actually warranted? It’s not generally the case that there is exactly one Correct Argument, which is counterintuitive, and that anything else will make someone’s mind snap shut and stop considering further inputs? 

…It’s possible that alternate-Estha’s mind is already shut against some inputs, that seems like a way a person could end up shaped by the Doomworld Timeline, but it genuinely seems unlikely that anything Merrin could say now would break his epistemics any more than they’re already broken? 

It’s possible that some things she could say will prompt him to get angry, but ‘Estha doesn’t get angry’ is not actually the success criterion here either. He might hurt Merrin! It would suck! But Laeirthe is preeeeeetty sure that Merrin running any degree of choosing her words to try to minimize the probability of alternate-Estha hurting her is - not the correct approach to solve the actual problem. 

(Laeirthe thinks it’s unlikely - not impossible, but not obviously possible either - that there’s an amount that alternate-Estha could torture Merrin here on this planet that would convince her to go work for the torture god, given that “going to work for the torture god” does not sound like it even results in an absence of further torture. If they do get “”rescued”” by Estha’s executive, then - Laeirthe doesn’t know - there are a lot of possible things that could happen to them that are pretty out-of-model and Merrin should probably assume that some sets of stimuli would result in her…not really being a person with values anymore. But probably the worst Estha can do here, with just the two of them on this planet, is to very thoroughly wreck their working relationship and also Merrin’s ability to do things in general. And while it’s somewhat optimistic to expect him to realize that in advance and not be stupid, Merrin should give him some credit for not being stupid. And obviously the mere threat of torture should not move her at all.)

(Was Laeirthe trying to be reassuring there? Why is he so bad at that?????)

Merrin spends a few seconds poking her implicit intuition-level model and new-vocabulary linguistic associations with Laeirthe’s prompt - starting from her model of her Estha, how can she imagine the Doomworld Alternate-Universe breaking his epistemic reasoning abilities, and how likely is it that that leaves low-hanging ways to make it even worse that are counterintuitive such that Merrin might hit them by accident - and, um. She’s sure glad she did that with the Headband Of Enhanced Emotional Regulation because it’s really superheated upsetting.

(It’s in many senses much less total horribleness than the existence of the torture afterlife! Merrin’s brain is definitely doing a near-mode versus far-mode thing in terms of allocating upsetness. She does not think it helps her achieve anything here to spend the next several days screaming so she’s going to observe this and give her brain an imaginary pat, thank you Merrin’s brain for giving her a way to keep handling this with some sort of dignity.) 

(Laeirthe had a feeling Merrin was about to go think about something upsetting on purpose, and had a go at keeping her facial expression frozen on whatever it was before. It probably doesn’t look completely natural, but alternate-Estha has got to be used to Merrin making all sorts of Thinking Faces.)

If she's controlling her facial expressions, Esta will roll Sense Motive about that, sure.  (1d20=14)+17=31.  His usual bonus to that would be +19, but he's missing a headband.

Merrin is in fact thinking really hard! She’s stressed and experiencing intense something-adjacent-to-social-anxiety, and separately she’s dissociating really hard.

Neither of those reactions are uncharacteristic of Mariona, really.

She seems like she could have been running into a thought she was flinchy about, just then, and was trying to suppress her squeamishness about it both internally and externally, though that suppression does not obviously looks like it involves as much intense self-loathing as Mariona would be applying in that context. 

There's something reminiscent of how Mariona looks when she's trying very hard to figure out what Esta wants to hear and what answer will pass the test, but - with much less of an underlying attitude of submission. 

(There's also no sign of an underlying attitude of domination! She's just not doing either of those things.) 

"If you're currently desperately trying to figure out how to pass an implied loyalty test or tell me something you think I want to hear, you should possibly just skip that part and blurt out whatever it is you imagine will offend me.  I have sufficient Sense Motive that concealment is not overwhelmingly likely to work.  And yes, it has already occurred to me that if you don't remember being a priestess of Asmodeus, or possibly even genuinely never were one of our priestesses, you may perhaps regard our interests as not being entirely aligned and specifically with respect to a message successfully reaching Cheliax and a Gate opening from there to here."

"If you were a priestess of Asmodeus, you're damned for what you've done regardless of what you do or don't remember, and it will not be in your interest to someday arrive in Hell with memories of working against Hell's interests.  In that case we are, in fact, entirely aligned in our true incentives."

"And if you never were one of us, then you're genuinely from a place that has a truly impressive amount of Law.  Unless I determined that I could get what I wanted out of you without your preferences mattering at all, so long you had greater than zero negotiating power, we'd cut a deal.*  There were multiple countries holding the Worldwound border, and both Mariona and I dealt with opposed alignments and countries Lawfully under the Worldwound Treaty; that, too, was a requirement of our jobs.  If you've already figured out how to get a message to Cheliax, you can, for example, offer that to me conditional on my signing a compact that the Gate only picks up myself, and I pay for Cheliax to leave you an item that does food and water purification before I depart.  As would leave you in a moderately better-off condition than if I stay here and lose my cleric powers.  I'd be reluctant to leave you behind if you were my real Mariona, but if Cheliax says they know where she is and she's not here, I'd go along with it."

(*)  Esta is leaving out, not really letting himself be conscious that Merrin might not already know it, the part where only a small amount of negotiating power might result in a quite unfavorable-seeming deal.  (Though Esta wouldn't know how to put it this way, the difference between Asmodeus and Abadar is not that Asmodeus won't offer you a compact that leaves you and He both better off than with no compact; Asmodeus loves that part nearly as much as Abadar.  The difference between the two gods is that, if Asmodeus is stronger than you and has asymmetrically much more threat to hold over you, He will consider His baseline and BATNA to be 'I hurt you until you obey, since you can't hurt Me back', and the compact is about you and He both doing better than that.)

LOL. LMAO. Their interests SURE AREN'T aligned. Kalorm still thinks Merrin should punch him, it'd be so funny. 

IT WOULD NOT BE FUNNY and separately would be spectacularly unwise, but now Merrin is quashing a half-hysterical giggle rather than all of the other things, which is - actually maybe an improvement, so thank you, Kalorm. 

Alternate-Estha is right. She can't run a social deception on him. And he does, in fact, seem to be aware of the concept that someone who wasn't from his horrible doomworld-timeline country might not consider his horrible doomworld torture god to be very appealing as an employer. His epistemic framework is not so thoroughly warped that he's incapable of noticing that fact. 

And it does not, actually, matter at all if Merrin predicts that the doomworld torture god to, what, grab her ""soul"" and yoink her to the doomworld torture afterlife? And, what, torture her more because of her decisions here and now? Merrin is not under the illusion that she could continue to be heroic in any way after that happened, if it were to happen, but it hasn't happened yet, and the mere threat that it might happen is not, in fact, going to budge her at all. 

(That part is fine. It's not socially awkward at all.) 

It is kind of a relief that she hasn't already figured out a way to send a message to Infernal Cheliax. She's not being deliberately unhelpful on that front, she just literally doesn't have the information Estha wants, and her genuine belief is that the most promising way out from here, if it exists at all, if this game is winnable, is that Estha will be able to think of something previously-unthinkable once he's no longer trapped in the epistemic framework of needing to convince himself he wants to work for an Evil torture god. 

She meets alternate-Estha's eyes. 

"You're right. I don't want to go back to your world and I don't want to work for Asmodeus. In the culture I remember living in, it's a bad thing when people who don't want to be hurt are hurt anyway, and I don't want it to happen – not just 'not to me', not just not done by me, I don't want it to happen at all, and in my culture that's how any sane person would react, it's not even complicated. I believe you, that Mariona agreed to work for Asmodeus, but I don't think it was because she wanted to hurt people. I think she didn't see any other option, and didn't think that what she wanted mattered, and didn't think she had a choice. But it kind of seems to me like this whole - game - is set up so that I have a choice now." 

So that both of them have a choice, but one of the pieces Merrin's opaque social intuition did venture is that she might not want to lean very hard on sounding like she's personally directly trying to persuade alternate-Estha to betray his horrible doomworld torture god, because - ugh, ""loyalty test"" captures it and UGH THAT CONCEPT. Her opaque social intuition also thought it was important to sound calm and measured and not emotional, which is fine, all of her emotions are way over there on the other side of a glass wall. 

In my culture there's an obvious story, Merrin imagined saying thirty seconds ago, about what a dath ilani protagonist does when they learn that Hell exists. But that seems like an extremely high-variance thing to say and also she's...not...actually sure that she can be the dath ilani protagonist that her narrative-trope-sense would slot in here. And her opaque-social-intuition thought she should keep this pretty short. 

Pause. 

"...I think it's probably a good idea for you to have your headband back to think," because she is imagining having this all the time and suddenly being without it in a high stakes negotiation and OOF, "but I'm probably going to be a lot more of a mess about the thing where Hell exists once I take it off." 

"It's in fact proving somewhat difficult for me to juggle the concepts of what you have no inkling about, if you're not Mariona and never were, or for that matter you're her but the memories are truly gone.  The missing headband is not in fact helping.  Of course Mariona wasn't given a good alternative to joining the Church of Asmodeus, and neither was I.  It's not considered a theological virtue in Asmodeanism to give people attractive alternatives to serving Asmodeus.  Mariona most certainly did have a choice -- she couldn't end up Lawful Evil and damned, if she was given literally no choices.  But the Church presented her with choices such that she, like almost every candidate put in her position, ended up choosing to hurt a lot of other people over getting hurt herself, realizing her very ordinary and perfectly normal innate Evil in a form that Pharasma would damn her about.  It's possible that you're different, yourself, but if you've never been put in her position I wouldn't go congratulating yourself over the fact."

"It's also not considered a virtue to be stupid about whether or not you've successfully narrowed somebody's alternatives that way, to believe you have them cornered when actually you don't.  That is what we would colloquially term Stupid Evil.  Not a formal alignment, per se, but the point is that Stupid Evil is importantly distinct from Lawful Evil.  If you, Merrin, didn't have a choice -- if it did not seem to me that you had, not only a choice, but perhaps alternatives that seemed potentially attractive to you -- I would not be offering to negotiate with you about it."

"I find it hard to imagine not knowing that Hell exists.  I suppose I can imagine finding it upsetting to learn that it's there, and that if you've chosen others getting hurt over yourself getting hurt, you are probably going there.  I will not be offended if you express that you would prefer to be on top of Hell rather than at the bottom of it; it's in fact conventional Asmodean theology to say that Asmodeus is the winner and we're the losers and that there's no morality to it beyond the fact that He is more powerful and the victor.  Being a grownup consists of accepting that this is the reality rather than whining about it, and making the best we can of the fact that Hell does exist; and rather a lot of devils are more powerful than us, and are going to want us to serve them, rather than them serving us.  If you can come to grips with this unpleasant fact faster by wearing the headband for a few more minutes, doing so sounds like it might save us both a lot of needless drama."

ARGH

What? That seems like about as well as it could possibly have gone, really. 

THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT LESS FRUSTRATING 

Merrin in fact looks frustrated - enough to be visible to someone trained in Cheliax, at least, she is pretty good at hiding frustration from fellow dath ilanis because guess what comes up constantly as a medtech and should not be made your patient's problem.

...and then she takes a breath and stops looking frustrated, because it won't accomplish anything. 

"How many people - souls - are actually in Hell?" she says. "Rough order of magnitude. If I'm going to accept the reality of it then I need to know what I'm accepting." 

In her culture, being a grownup does NOT consist of "accepting that this is the reality rather than whining about it, and making the best we can of the fact that Hell does exist", because WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE IN THE ALTERNATE-UNIVERSE DOOMWORLD TIMELINE, but it is true that it won't actually help or accomplish anything for her to be too upset to think, and maybe conceivably she can use the enhancement to frontload a whole lot of processing and then...let Laeirthe pilot her body? Since apparently he can switch off emotions at will? It's kind of wild that that works but her opaque social intuition definitely thinks that alternate-Estha will be very unimpressed if she has to go cry about it for the next 24 hours. 

"It has never before in my life occurred to me that I'd want to know this number and I can't imagine why Hell would spend the intervention budget to tell us.  I don't know how old Creation is, I don't know how many planes are within Creation or how many planets each plane has or their average age or their average population or how fast their kinds of mortals reproduce and die, I don't know what fraction of Evil people end up reading Lawful or how many the devils at the gates of Abaddon deem worthy of Hell if they plead for it, I don't know how many devils have been destroyed in conflicts with Heaven or the Abyss."

"Trillions, certainly.  How many trillions?  I have no idea.  Why would any of that matter to you?  -- Also, now that I think of it, where are you getting your information about Hell, if not Mariona's memories?  I hadn't described it much beyond just using the word, before you started feeling upset about it."