Dude, nobody from dath ilan would give up on that problem without thinking about it for like thirty seconds.

(This thought is suppressed by midlevel generalizations before it can fully form, since it would result in heretical thinking, which constitutes failure at the problem of thinking.)

Something deeply and very long-buried inside Esta, hammered down and down and down under different circumstances and still-hardwired inside him nonetheless, is interested in the prospect of horrible things not happening later.  If there is a way to accomplish that, it would quite like to know, or think about it if thinking about it would not itself be horrible.

It tries to push harder for the Learned Cultural Adaptation thought to come out.

This is going directly against a lot of learned patterns and learned forbidden-patterns and midlevel generalizations.

The result is that Esta continues staring blankly into space without fully forming any verbal thoughts for some number of moments.

His face stays slack in its default configuration.

He feels like he'd like to scream very loudly.

This has also been conditioned-against incredibly thoroughly.

His brain briefly suggests that surely it would be Approved to wail in despair and terror and dismay about having been abandoned by Asmodeus as His cleric -- that this would be deemed an appropriate reaction by the Church -- and doesn't get very far, because obviously according to midlevel generalization openly screaming would constitute failure at something.  It's not so much that Merrin would be unimpressed, as that all the other people watching at the time the midlevel generalization was formed, would be unimpressed.

Esta doesn't particularly wish that he had a wand of Fox's Cunning, because he doesn't actually know that +4 Cunning would result in a different outcome for his own thought processes.  He's never had a Fox's Cunning and doesn't know what it can do.

(The same applies to wishing for an education in Computer Science (dath ilan), or training in thinking generally.)

...he should follow Merrin and ask her to explain what she means by that while she's still got Share Language, because he can foresee a lot of stupid and unpleasant future conversation that will be even more agonizing if it's conducted in halting partial language.

This internal outcome is produced after horrible tearing feelings of internal conflict which would themselves constitute failure to consciously notice.

He goes to where Merrin is trying to do her non-urgent calculations, a longer walk than before they moved to the expanded hab but still a very short walk.  "It's a waste of our remaining Taldane, but less of a waste of our remaining Taldane than doing nothing with it in the face of an unpleasant conversation that is obviously going to happen anyway," Esta states.  "How do you imagine that you are going to, as you put it, keep me out of Hell?"

Do they have to have that conversation right now. He has a good point about the language but DO THEY HAVE TO. Merrin has been having a REALLY BAD DAY, okay, and admittedly Estha seems to be...taking his own bad day worse than she's taking hers? unless secretly she's being just as concerning and just having a complete failure of self-awareness about it?...but, like, from an objective outside perspective, is "being dropped as a cleric by his horrible doomgod" actually a worse day to be having than LEARNING THAT HELL EXISTS AND TRILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE IN IT. 

Merrin is maybe a little bit mad at Estha, actually, and had been kind of maybe hoping to avoid any substantive interactions until after she's had a chance to float in an ocean under the stars for twelve hours straight and regain some kind of mental equilibrium. 

"I literally just told you I have no idea how yet," she says. "I'm still mostly at the planning stage where I figure out how to get more resources or allies, and I'm probably going to be mostly generating bad ideas that won't work for a while, and like I said I'm not expecting your help. I can understand why it would be - scary - if you think I can't possibly succeed and Asmodeus would be mad. ...The only bad idea that probably won't work that I've come up with so far is somehow finding a way to - keep your soul on this planet? if you die?" 

Probably cryo would not do that, and also ughhhhhhh he doesn't have Baseline and she has no vocabulary in "Taldane" for 'cryo' and doesn't feel like explaining it the long way, even though it won't exactly be easier to explain when she's relying on remembered and recorded vocabulary only.

(She has been reading all of her tidal patterns documentation out loud to herself, in alternating word-pairs with the best approximate translation, and she's intending to keep doing that on whatever text she can find or by retelling stupid fanfic out loud to herself until the Share Language runs out, it's faster and more compatible with multitasking than writing vocabulary down and she'll have all the time she wants later to process the recording into a dictionary.) 

"- and with more resources or allies, if any of those plans work out, I could try to get both of us sufficiently far away that Asmodeus can't find you." Shrug. "I don't think those are good ideas but that wasn't even an entire five minutes of thinking about it. I guess if you feel like explaining why it's impossible, that would give me a better sense of the problem constraints." 

Less consideration than Merrin would usually use went into checking whether any of that was maybe a bad idea to say, though she did deliberately not bring up, for example, the idea of trying to scream-thoughts-into-the-void as loudly as she can at the hypothetical god of Let's Solve This Hell Problem, or any other plan that would involve fighting rather than running away.

(She's also not going to be completely hiding in her body language that she's irritated about the interruption and perhaps with Esta more broadly.) 

"Trap the Soul is an 8th-circle wizard spell that puts somebody, body and soul, into a gemstone.  Nobody sensible considers it a means of escaping Hell, because eventually somebody breaks the stone and you're back in the same situation as before.  Asmodeus would hunt you down.  Morrigna psychopomps would hunt you down.  Marut inevitables would hunt you down.  Time would crumble the stone to dust.  It doesn't matter whether it takes a thousand years or ten million years, it changes nothing."

"As for your second idea, we aren't likely to get back even to Golarion or dath ilan.  Getting my soul outside of Creation and Pharasma's judgment seems like a 'stretch goal' indeed, as you put it."

ohheyisTHATwhyanyoneevertriestobargainwiththeDarkTapestry

It's not actually reasonable to be finding this interaction as enraging as she is, Merrin tells herself firmly. Her frustration isn't really in response to any of what Estha is saying, which is - reasonable to bring up from his own perspective, and helpful information to have on her side, and she's somewhat confused on what he even wants to get out of arguing with her, what's even the point in convincing her not to try when, if he's right, he can just let her try and fail, but it's in expectation probably going to help if he's willing to talk to her and she can get more information, so she should do the thing that achieves her goals and not tell him to please go away...

She's been awake for a pretty long time, hasn't she. Ugh, she's going to have to go back to budgeting time to sleep, now that she can't just almost entirely replace sleep with powerful healing magic. Anyway, it makes sense that she's cranky and a bit stupid, but Merrin has trained on scenarios where she had to do objectively harder things than having a conversation with someone she's mad at, while objectively more fatigued than she is right now. Stop whining and just do it. 

“Oh, so trapping a soul is a thing in principle," Merrin says sunnily. "I wasn't sure. I don't have access to wizard spells right now, so unless that changes I would be trying to figure out something non-magical, which probably doesn't work at all but if it did work it would have different constraints. ...It's unclear to me why Asmodeus would prioritize tracking your soul down on another planet if he didn't think it was worth Aspexia Rugatonn's spells to get you back alive? You would think a living 6th circle cleric would be more valuable to him than one more soul out of trillions."

(Does the Share Language care to inform her what in the world a "Morrigna psychopomp" is, or a "Marut inevitable"? Are they the sort of thing that could annihilate Merrin from existence, because as long as there's still a Merrin, she's going to keep working on trying to make it so there isn't a Hell anymore in a thousand years there are all sorts of ways for Merrin to stop existing, it might even be the default outcome here, she has no idea how the ending-up-here thing worked, she doesn't know that she'll respawn on another planet again if she just dies here. But if she DOES then she will be VERY ANNOYED and then she will get back to work on her stupid enraging research project of finding Golarion and recruiting allies and solving their Hell problem.) 

"...It's not a -" crux? no one-syllable word for that, "- a deciding factor, for me, whether this is actually possible. In my culture, a legendary hero," SEE KALORM SHE SAID IT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE, SO THERE, "would never just take at face value that a problem was impossible, if it was important, and this is important to me, and if I'm going to be stuck in a stupid ridiculous game played by an Outer God then I might as well stop whining about how I don't like it and try playing to win. You might've had more luck convincing your Mariona to be more ambitious if you could've given her a project she would actually want to succeed at. That being said, I do wonder if it was in the interests of your," word for 'the Governance-like organization working for Asmodeus?', "- of the church of Asmodeus, to conceal information about solutions and convince you it's a harder problem than it actually is." 

(Psychopomps are guides of the dead; they sound True Neutral, and like outsiders, and like they're associated with the Creator.

Inevitables sound Lawful Neutral and like outsiders.

Maruts sound scarier than Morrigna.)

Again the collision of forces inside his brain.

Of course if there was a way out of Hell, the Church wouldn't tell him.

Mid-level generalizations prevent that.

The vocalization 'The Church wouldn't lie to us like that' is generated, and then struck from consideration because what if Merin can figure it out (deeper desire, blocked overtly, continues to exert pressure of rationalization): obviously Merrin would not believe that, obviously, what with it being blatantly false, so he shouldn't say that and lose her trust (the deeper desire is happy with this conclusion and does not permit further reasoning about whether Merrin would in fact not believe it or if there are things he could say to make her believe it)

(...And wouldn't it have been nice if he could get Mariona like, 20% this 'ambitious', and not any more ambitious than that.)

The question of whether Mariona could have been like this if she liked her job doesn't promise good things to any level of him and is therefore dropped from processing.

"Of course if there was some cheap escape from Hell, they wouldn't tell us.  That doesn't mean there is one."

"And yes, before you ask, we are indeed instructed that Hell will not be pleased if, having died, they find that I was trying to figure out a way to escape Hell.  That doesn't mean there's a way out.  Mortals are stupid.  Let them run around thinking and thinking and thinking about whether they can please themselves more, and eventually they will make a mistake while evaluating some stupid plan and decide it's a brilliant one.  Then they'll run off to please themselves, and then go to Hell and be worse off than if they'd obeyed when told what to not think about."

(Esta's overt rationalization for saying this:  Perhaps it will be useful to have Merrin more sympathetic to him.)

(Esta's actual collision of incoherent impulses:  It's Complicated.)

If Merrin had any way of knowing that any part of Esta's reasoning in saying that was to appear sympathetic, she would be staring in bemusement at how in the world he could possibly be modeling that as a sympathy-garnering thing to say! ...And, in the course of noticing that confusion, might make other observations that would perhaps be useful to make sense of how Esta is ""thinking"", which - if she had full visibility of it is - is not a process that Merrin would have thought to use the word "thinking" to describe.

She would also be pretty bemused at the implicit expectation that he still had any of her trust to lose, except that on further consideration she would grant that it was possible for their trust and cooperation situation to get a whole lot worse. 

Since Merrin does not in fact have any idea what could have motivated Estha to say that, her initial reflexive reaction is that he's trying to be infuriating on purpose. (Because he thinks that maybe if he makes himself obnoxious enough then she'll decide she doesn't care to keep him out of Hell after all???) 

....Ooooor possibly Merrin is just cranky and this is entirely a her problem and she should avoid making it his problem too. 

"Asmodeus sounds like a terrible -" 'people manager' does not feel like it would be particularly idiomatic in Taldane, what's the actual best translation here for the Baseline concept she means, it's more general than 'executive' which there also weirdly isn't a great direct translation for, just a lot of more specific ones with connotations she doesn't feel like doing linguistic introspection on right this second, "- commander? I guess I can see how being a terrible commander might from the inside feel like everyone who works for you being stupid." 

Was that helpful to say. Probably not. It's hard to focus on that right now but she literally just said that this was really important to her and she would try really hard, and right now this is what trying looks like.

Merrin shrugs. "I understand that you're telling me you can't be helpful toward this particular goal. Is there anything else you wanted to accomplish with this conversation, apart from conveying that you think I'm wasting my time? ...And that I'll have a bad time if I am the same - soul - as your Mariona but with edits, but I'm not going to modify my own values," did that sentence make sense at all?? there were words that felt like the right words but she's not sure if it holds together as a phrase like the Baseline version would, "on the basis of a hypothetical future threat."

And in fact it's weirdly not-hard to ignore the hypothetical future threat, because...it's too hypothetical? Because on the level of intuitiveprediction, she doesn't really expect that she's the same soul as Mariona and Asmodeus already has dibs? She mostly expects that if she dies she'll either cease to exist, as one would normally expect, or end up on ANOTHER planet which will PROBABLY ALSO BE HORRIBLE because apparently most of the larger Reality is horrible. ...It remains that Merrin would try very hard not to change any of her behavior if she were actually scared of Asmodeus yoinking her, but it would probably take more effort, and given that she's kind of fine with remembering to hold a slot in her explicit worldmodel for that being the situation, and not trying all that hard to make her emotions update on it too.

...She's not really feeling scared of anything, right now. Huh. That's neat. Probably at some point her brain will remember to cringe in mortified agony at the possibility that she's not actually any kind of Protagonist who can Do Impossible Things and is completely deluding herself, but right now she can just matter-of-factly look at a problem and consider that it's pretty likely to be impossible and decide to try anyway. To set her motivation system firmly in the world where her actions might matter to an outcome she's invested in, even if on an epistemic level she's tracking that there are only some worlds in which that's true and she might not be in any of them.

Merrin has a lot of practice with that, actually. So much practice. The entire story of how she ended up working at Exception Handling involved fighting with everything she had for a patient whose odds of a positive outcome were initially put at 10%.

Maybe it's not actually any different? She never had trouble with attempting very hard things that were not very likely to work when it was non-magical medicine she was doing. 

it would be really nice if she could solve this problem with medical skills, she's tired of spending nearly all of her time and effort and thought-cycles on things that aren't the one (1) thing she's ever been actually good at that's whining at Reality again and it won't help. 

"You are later going to come back with a set of wacky dath ilani ideas for keeping me out of Hell and the problems with those ideas are going to involve new terms like 'Marut inevitables', or even just, you'll have a lot of questions about things you want to know to make your insane plans.  That conversation is easier, perhaps much easier, if we have it before the Share Language runs out."

so that there is a higher tiny chance that it works

that's not even the actual reason Esta is saying all these things right now, it is just a desperate unacknowledged sense of urgency inside him that has no outlet but to do all of the things right away

You could always just refuse to answer my questions if it's that annoying, Merrin thinks, and she's about to say it out loud but catches herself, it's snark and she's trying not to make it Estha's problem that she's kind of mad at him right now. 

...Why is he so proactively trying to answer her questions, while also claiming in every other sentence that it's a waste of time and he doesn't even want her to succeed? It's kind of bemusing behavior! 

It takes Merrin an embarrassingly long time to come up with the hypothesis that Estha might be saying things he at best complicatedly endorses and might be conflicted about what he wants. It's particularly embarrassing to have failed to notice that because Merrin herself is unusually prone, for a dath ilani, to wanting things that conflict with each other and taking an awkwardly long time to fully notice this fact, and also unusually prone to just Saying Stuff that she later recognizes as blatantly wrongthought. (Admittedly “later” is usually, like, three seconds later, and she would SAY SO once she noticed, but it does not seem like alternate-Estha has that script when he doesn’t have Cultural Adaptation up.)

Okay. Does it feel more like she can make sense of his current actions with the model that Estha in fact doesn't want to go to Hell, for all the obvious reasons, but is also successfully being threatened-by-future-hypothetical-torture into not saying so to her? And that he does want to - be helpful - but can only approach it sideways and while making himself as obnoxious as possible, with a conversational frame that one could easily mistake for "trying to convince her she's wasting her time and/or make her angry enough to refuse to help him", because those are goals that Asmodeus wouldn't be mad about? 

Merrin's first instinct is to say all of that so she can check if she's right, but it does occur to her within a couple of seconds that this is probably not actually a good idea. 

Annoyingly! This leaves her with very limited options for checking her theory against reality!

(Merrin would normally have some options for sanity-checking a hypothesis about what was going on in someone else's head that didn't involve asking them, because normally she can get at least some information from body language and stuff, but she thinks she basically can't ever tell what alternate-Estha from the horrible doomworld is feeling, and her opaque social intuition does occasionally return something but she doesn't particularly trust it to be accurate.) 

...She is, at least, feeling less overtly angry with him now, so even if her theory is completely wrong, provisionally rolling with it might be pragmatically useful for this conversation? 

Merrin is still, to be clear, pretty tempted to tell him to go away politely ask if they can defer this conversation. It's not a good time! She's applying every single cognitive reframing technique she can find and it's not enough to get her out of her horrible mood, and just barely enough that she can kind of more or less function anyway, and being less angry with Estha personally is if anything making her mood worse. 

And she suspects he's underrating how conscientious she's been over recent days about actually learning the language, ever since he told her that his Sending had failed and his deity might stop giving him spells, and that was like a week of standard-24-hour days ago. Merrin is not, like, very good at languages by dath ilan standards, because she is not very good at most thinkoomph-y work by dath ilan standards, but she's actually relatively stronger at memorization than abstract reasoning, and she's great at deliberate practice. She's going to resent the extra cognitive load, for sure, but between her Utopian vocabulary and all the new terms in Taldane and Infernal, she thinks she should be able to express pretty much arbitrary questions, albeit un-idiomatically, and make sense of Estha's answers, and like, when a new concept comes up she should probably be asking him for a full explanation anyway and not relying entirely on linguistic introspection. From her own perspective, it's awkward that she'll no longer have an even-slightly-independent information source, but...it also shows, she thinks, that she has specifically Estha's vocabulary and word-associations from the Share Language, and probably there exist places in Golarion where Lawful Evil is not seen as the sparkly-best alignment and Good is not seen as "useless and pathetic and self-defeating", so she's needing to do her own questioning and reinterpretation anyway, and of course that's not a problem from Estha's point of view anyway. In short, Merrin feels like she could make a pretty solid argument that having this conversation the next planetary morning might be less frustrating and unpleasant for Estha, because having had some time to process things will more than cancel out the added language-barrier friction?

...BUT it's occurring to her that Estha might...be freaked out? The fact that he doesn't look visibly distressed isn't really evidence that he isn't upset? And he might want to talk to her as a distraction from that? Merrin's felt that way before! And of course she would just say that, if that were the case, but Estha might not feel like he can? But if his behavior is showing him persistently wanting to keep the conversation going even while claiming to find it unpleasant, then maybe she can make a wild guess that he doesn't want to be alone right now? And she did say out loud that her calculations weren't all that urgent and she could be around if he wanted to talk. It would be very emotionally immature of her to back out of that offer just because she's in a bad mood. 

"Okay," Merrin says. "Can you tell me about all the plans you've heard of people trying for escaping Hell, that they thought were clever but that were actually stupid and didn't work? So I don't have to waste your time later by asking about them?" 

And she's not actually going to take his word for everything on whether particular kinds of approach are inevitably doomed, because if her theory is right then he feels like he has to claim that regardless.

If anyone in Cheliax asked him this, it would be very obvious what they were planning and heretical to answer honestly (this thought is shot down by deeper desires, waving a rationalization-flag that looks vaguely like 'different context, conclusion inapplicable, you probably had a good previous reason for saying true things to Merrin so just keep doing that')

"I suppose the classic plan is to become a lich, an undead version of a mage.  It's only for wizards or maybe a sorcerer who got very lucky on exact spells, or I suppose clerics of Urgathoa; and so not applicable to this case, but then nothing else is applicable to this case either.  It requires the 6th circle of casting.  Most wizards who try it fail and die.  All of those who succeed will be insane in the way of liches, which often lends itself to mad plans against the living which results in the lich being hunted down inside of its first decade or first century.  And then even liches who've lasted through millennia sometimes still die, for example because Tar-Baphon enslaves them for a mad attempt at world domination.  From which any reasonable person would conclude that liches are just slightly longer-lived than mortals and will face Pharasma's judgment in their due time.  It's a high-profile example from my own perspective, because the Church of Asmodeus has to expend energy on mind-screening our wizards for early signs of that heresy or propagandizing them against it; Chelish wizards sometimes decide that they'd like to sacrifice their long-term future in Hell for the lifeless existence of an undead for a fancied millennium."

"The country of Galt devised an artifact guillotine, the Final Blade, which traps all the souls of those it kills; a threat against the few Good people who might defy them, and a supposed mercy to the many Evil people of their own government that they find occasion to execute.  It's a stupid idea; at some point someone will destroy the artifact and free the souls for judgment.  Hell hasn't even bothered to post a bounty on destroying them, because it is inevitable and Hell is patient.  If no mortal government or adventurer got around to it for a thousand years, the Morrigna would show up, and if those failed the Maruts, and I don't know what comes after Maruts because nothing of Golarion has ever earned it."

"The Queen of Cheliax sometimes finds it amusing to turn people into statues, ward them against lesser divinations, and bury them far underground.  The Church tolerates it because it gives the Queen some threat to hold over the sort of Asmodean whom we've successfully taught to not fear Hell that much.  More importantly, because eventually those statues will be found and shattered.  If you put a statue into a Bag of Holding and tore the bag to scatter its contents into the Astral Plane, which usually suffices to lose a thing forever, the statue would be found by Morrigna soon enough.  If Heaven tried to guard a statue, Hell would invade and Maruts would fight on Hell's side."

"This entire situation is -- I forget the {Baseline} word -- the balance of a game in which Hell and Cheliax have already made sensible moves to cut off their opponents' possible moves.  For example.  While it is hard for ordinary people to be fairly judged as Good, never mind wizards who've spent years serving the purposes of Hell and Cheliax, that leaves open the possibility of unfair judgment.  The 5th-circle cleric spell Atonement, which costs forty times the annual earnings of an average laborer, can do the equivalent of a reset on all past deeds and directly change an alignment to Good -- provided the atoner sincerely regrets their past decisions, and didn't perform them with the intent to later cheat by Atonement.  Our higher wizards could afford that spell, cast outside Cheliax, and our 5th-circles could escape the country by Teleport if they tried.  We therefore require our upper 4th-circles to sell their souls to Hell, which results in them going to Hell regardless of all other deeds and bypassing judgment.  If they refused to do so, they would be Maledicted to Hell instead -- a 4th-circle cleric spell which sends someone to the lower plane of the god who granted the Malediction, again regardless of past good deeds and Pharasma's judgment.  In a way, you could say that Hell is fairer than Pharasma, Who allows soul-sales under circumstances like that.  Hell could pay a pittance for souls if they chose, for how little choice the seller has.  And yet Hell nonetheless offers good value to our wizards, in the form of permanent Arcane Sight or similar benefits, even when they'd certainly go to Hell either way."

"Clerics can't sell their souls, in general.  So the Church makes sure that its own 4th-circles at some point make a very Evil choice of the sort that they could not sincerely regret and Atone for.  Xovaikain is one of several afterlives that are worse than Hell; where Hell torments for obedience, punishment for past transgressions, and to shape its souls into devils, Xovaikain is operated by the god Zon-Kuthon, whose [utilityfunction] was inverted by the Dark Tapestry upon an ancient god of Chaotic Good, to create a god that hates joy and beauty and prizes pain and suffering above all else.  Shortly after reaching 4th circle, the Church presents you with a choice between being Maledicted to Xovaikain by an allied Kuthite cleric, or a relatively innocent family of peasants being Maledicted to Xovaikain in your place.  It's not meant to be a difficult choice and I don't think I've ever heard of anyone hesitating about it for a moment.  The point is that to Atone for that choice, a former cleric would have to be the sort of person who could sincerely regret that they didn't go to Xovaikain instead of that family, and be ready to go to Xovaikain in another's place if faced with the same choice again; this is unlikely for almost anyone on the face of Golarion, let alone a former cleric of Asmodeus.  So clerics don't need to consider the question of whether we could successfully Atone our way out of Hell, and the Church doesn't need to worry significantly about us having a change of heart and defecting."

"There is no known spell Benediction to do the opposite of Malediction.  I believe this not only because the Church told me so, but because I know as a matter of geopolitics that some rulers of countries with obviously Lawful Evil temperaments nonetheless try to do Good deeds or fund Good churches in usually futile attempts to stay out of Hell.  They would never bother if a Benediction spell existed.  I'd guess the Good gods have agreed among themselves never to grant it, so that rulers and others sufficiently wealthy are forced to try to be Good if they want to stay out of the lower planes, and can't just take a cheaper alternative."