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"You're not making sense," Merrin complains. "- Oh, we're not speaking Baseline, are we, that wouldn't help."

She's not sure what they are speaking but the backstory plot is reminding her that conceptualmagic translation is a thing.

(If more metacognition were online, Merrin probably would be worrying about the cognitohazards implied by 'the rules say you ought to be going insane', but right now her wordless thought process goes something like 'what's a cognitohazard, is that a kind of fruit' and then it's gone, dropped from the narrowed field of her awareness and forgotten.) 

"Look, I'm working on it, okay?" She feels bad for causing him problems she doesn't feel bad, because that emotional pathway is still, right now, non-functional for anything short of 'trillions of people in Hell' and a mildly awkward and deeply confusing social interaction does not even come close. "I can get over the part where I don't want to be special, I think." In this moment she's half-forgotten why that was ever a problem. "If that's really what the game is about. But if negotiation and coordination metaphysically don't work for you then I don't know what you're doing playing games with someone from dath ilan." 

"Try playing the game with pieces all not from dath ilan and see how far you get!  They find out that many entities inside a vast universe are bigger than them and indifferent to their own welfare, and then they go insane, screaming and clawing at the walls or tweeting about how the orthogonality thesis is false.  If now you're like 'why would that drive anyone insane, it's just a big indifferent universe with some big entities', that is the point of playing games containing a piece from dath ilan, even if we can't coordinate with you at all."

"Anyway.  I can't ask you to do anything differently conditional on what I do, because that would be coordination.  But I, Nyaaaaaarlathotep, now declare --"

(Dream ends.)

Merrin wakes up after almost eleven hours, with scattered and fragmented memories of some very odd dreams - not in itself surprising, she put her brain through some weird intense shit, it was going to have vivid dreams about that - but, also, an inexplicable feeling of optimism?

The good mood is especially surprising when her physical state is this miserable. It turns out that doing almost 30 hours of physical activity, with the benefit of a stamina-enhancing magic item, and then removing said magic item and falling asleep on a slightly uneven floor, without having consumed any extra protein, is a recipe for some spectacular delayed-onset muscle soreness. And she has a dehydration headache, and after all that she does not have any new cleric specialabilities, and so it’s really quite hard to see why she’s experiencing positive affect? 

…Merrin is not going to complain. The situation should be depressing but that doesn’t actually mean that being depressed will help. If a quirk of her neurochemistry is going to let her, instead, not do that, then this is probably net-helpful, even if she has to be somewhat suspect of her intuitions around probability-of-success for any specific idea.

She’s not even particularly filled with dread at the prospect of future steps requiring talking to Esta! If anything, she’s straightforwardly curious to find out what he’s thinking and feeling about their whole situation, now, and whether almost two 24-days elapsed since Asmodeus dropped him as a cleric will have done much to shift him to a less frustrating mental equilibrium.

It still takes her a while to actually get up, but sheer hunger will eventually motivate her to stumble out and start taking steps toward acquiring food. There are so many more steps required, now.

She makes her way out of the side room, moving a bit stiffly, and - if he’s still to be found in roughly the same location - smiles at Esta without stopping to think for even an instant whether this is weird. 

People who are faced with a present situation that strongly points to an unbearable future -- like a cleric abandoned by his god to die on an alien planet and then go to Hell, say -- have several options for fleeing painful reality.

Consider the example of someone whose doctor has recently surprised him with with news that he has Stage 4 cancer, which is going to require painful and debilitating treatments; this will give him a small chance of surviving, but mostly he'll likely die gruesomely though a bit later.

One thing you could do, faced with this situation, is blind yourself to the Future's existence; you are just going to endlessly rehearse over and over how your current medical condition seems great, and you haven't seen it get worse, and probably the doctor is just wrong about that horrible stuff scheduled to happen to you later.

But this isn't a stable mental state at WIS 22, even without a dath ilani education.  Cheliax does manage to teach you pretty thoroughly that the horrible painful Future you tried to ignore, will in fact show up later and hurt you.

A converse way out is avoid thinking about those present facts that point strongly toward awful things happening to you later, and find something you can be uncertain about, instead.  If you are a mortal from a planet that can't scry afterlives, for example, you might convince yourself that Death is a very grand mystery and you can't possibly know what'll happen to you after that.

Over the last 48 hours, Esta's brain has settled on trying to dwell mainly on the question of how the Outer God's game might play out.

This occurred via the following cognitive execution pathway, which wasn't quite inevitable to the point where another mortal could advance-predict it happening to an arbitrary other person in Esta's situation, but which was nonetheless very common and ordinary in retrospect:

Most facts that Esta actually knows, point toward bad things happening to him.

Thinking about the actually-known facts is therefore painful.

The intentions of the Outer Gods, and the possible playout of their game, are things that Esta can tell himself that he doesn't know.  He can manage to be radically uncertain about that.

Therefore, the least painful thoughts to rehearse and chew on endlessly are thoughts about the Outer Gods and the questionable purposes of Yog-Sothoth's game!

(Admittedly, in Creation this may actually be a valid source of hope, unlike other places whose inhabitants briefly try to take refuge in their uncertainty about superintelligent motivations.  Outer Gods have mortal impacts that look more like they're being sampled from a distribution that significantly includes outcomes like "go around isekaiing people to other worlds", rather than being uncertain over a space of preferred outcomes more alien and hence more fatal than that.)

"Has anything nice happened?" he'll say, slowly and carefully and clearly in Utopian, on seeing Merrin's smile.

Merrin stops and takes a solid twenty seconds to consider that. 

(The actual language-comprehension does feel effortful, the way using an Exception Handling software system would when she was only introduced to it a few weeks before using it live in a training sim, but it’s happening at nearly-normal speed. Expressive vocabulary is a definitely more halting, but really most of the delay is in thinking about the question. You wouldn’t really expect it to be such an oddly difficult question to answer.)

“…Nothing outside me, that I saw and can say?” Merrin manages eventually. “I did not find cleric spells.” She’s pretty sure that sentence is not idiomatic but she’s not going to go back and try again, the meaning should have been clear enough. “But I did thinking, for praying, and I am not so angry. I want for nice things to happen for you, not just think I ought to want. Being angry toward you was not finding this work easier, so it is a nice thing for me to stop that.”

"You can try some simple Baseline," Esta says, still slowly, and using the Baseline word 'Baseline'.  "Usually, understanding a language is easier than speaking it."

"Any clever plans made, yet?"

(He’s had way fewer hours of Baseline magic-assisted practice than she's had of Utopian, and she thinks Baseline might be a more difficult language from the Golarion-language-family starting point, but sure, she'll just try really hard to actually remember to keep it simple.)

...Laeirthe, that's your cue, what if anything do they have lined up in terms of clever ideas to try next? 

"It seems worth considering whether the Outer God that brought you here has the best visibility, and if they can hear prayers and might relay messages to other gods if it accomplished their goals here. But that is a clever-bad-idea, not a real plan." 

(Laeirthe is just...more or less speaking directly, there. Any difference in word-choice patterns will probably be less obvious without the translation spells.) 

Merrin's best guess in her own head, right now, is that this isn't winnable without Esta. ...Not just in the sense that she needs to consult his knowledge of Golarion or borrow his magic items, that much is obvious, but...that he also needs to be acting as a dath ilani protagonist?

Knowing Estha, this does not feel like it should be a hard ask! It feels like it should be a much easier and more straightforwardly ego-syntonic personal growth arc for him than it was for Merrin! And yet, a whole lot of what Merrin has actually observed leaves her feeling like Esta isn't angling himself toward the world in that way at all. The doomworld doomgod country is really horrifying! It took the protagonist-nature out of someone who really ought to have it! 

But maybe the right sequence of events can put it back? 

It feels...right in terms of tropes, if any of Merrin's reasoning there is reality-tracking in the slightest...but there are also normal-logic arguments. Even without the doomgod specialabilities, Esta is an intelligent and capable person, with many years of training and experience that seem like they should be relevant, and the problem is just that he seems to be unable to actually think about the problem, or even see it as a problem at all. 

- wait, no, back up - there was a thing - 

(Laeirthe misses the headband. It would be neat if it boosted cognition more evenly and in a way that didn't wear out Merrin's working memory and processing speed quite so hard - her brain still feels tired from yesterday, he can tell - but it's still the only time he feels like he has enough space to stretch out.) 

That! 'Even without the doomgod specialabilities', and they talked about what other gods might pick up Merrin, but for whatever reason it didn't occur to either of them to ask Esta whether it's possible to get cleric specialabilities back from a different god if the first one drops you.

- and, if it is possible, whether it's starting again from zero. Because if not, then it does in fact become very, very relevant that Esta previously had 6th-circle spells. 

Under other circumstances, Merrin would probably be pre-emptively flinching and tensing up about how this feels like an incredibly awkward and potentially upsetting question to ask!

Not these circumstances, though. She's over it.

(Plausibly all the social anxiety will come flooding back in at some point and she cannot actually cure her social anxiety permanently just by remapping her emotional scale to fit the existence of Hell, at which point mere awkwardness in a conversation becomes a rounding error. But it hasn't yet.) 

...She does spend a moment considering how likely it is to be upsetting or offensive in a way that affects their working relationship, or whether there are other reasons why it's unstrategic to ask him directly. She doesn't think of anything that outweighs the value of knowing that information, and her opaque social instincts aren't all that alarmed about him right at this moment. 

"Is it known in Golarion whether former clerics of one god can become clerics of another god?" she asks (with the Utopian terms for 'god' and 'cleric', and otherwise in Baseline but at a level of complexity she would aim at, like, a four-year-old, or a patient just emerging from a coma.) "And, if so, whether they retain their -" ugh what was that word, it was in Taldane and not Utopian because it only came up in the final confrontation, "- their [level]?" 

He'll answer the simpler question first.  "If a new god chooses the cleric, the cleric starts at their old level."

"...and."  Esta is not sure how to put this simply, in the vocabulary they now have left.  He told Merrin, a couple of days earlier, that this would be an easier conversation to have in Taldane.  "The Outer Gods are not usually on nice -- happy, fun, good -- terms with the gods of Pharasma's Creation.  Though --"

Esta speaks more slowly.

"The one that brought us here might be different."

Yog-Sothoth runs spacetime for Creation.  It is the only Outer God that Pharasma actively worked with to establish Creation.  That's one reason It is Chaotic Neutral, like the Maelstrom that predates Creation, rather than Chaotic Evil, like Rovagug that wants to eat Creation.  It could count as Lawful, even, like Jerishall, or pure Neutral like Gozreh; except for the part where, instead of that, It classifies Chaotic. 

...Esta is pretty sure he didn't know any of that one year earlier and he does not per se remember actually learning it at any point.

"- I should know more words in Utopian and Taldane soon," Merrin says, because she's not sure she actually thought to say it earlier. "I recorded many hours of words in pairs with Baseline, to learn later." 

Esta did not at any EARLIER point think to tell her that the specific Outer God that set all of this up was - "on speaking terms" with the gods of Golarion feels like a weird way to put it - but for some reason it doesn't feel terribly surprising. 

"Well," she says, after giving it some thought, "that sounds like plans where you become a cleric of a Lawful Neutral god," she's pretty sure that works for the weird alignment-distance rule, "would get us further than plans where I do." 

Hoooooow does that seem to go over. Merrin is very motivated to try to help, if the only blocker is, like, figuring out how to be the sort of person that a god like Abadar would like? Abadar would like Estha, she thinks, so the innate traits must be there. But if the blocker is that Esta still thinks this would be an insane thing to try for because of the Asmodeus-threat of making Hell worse if he does additional things that Asmodeus disapproves of, then...well, maybe a Keeper could pull it off anyway, but Merrin is fundamentally not qualified to work around his active refusal to cooperate. 

Merrin. Merrin listen. ""Fundamentally not qualified""? Does that seem like the protagonist mindset???

UGH fine maybe not quite. 

...That's perhaps not really the true objection here. Merrin...does not want to solve this by reinventing Keeper talk-control, okay? Even if that were something she could conceivably do? She wants to find a way to cooperate and work with Esta in a normal way, on something that should also be pretty important to him! It’s one thing to decide that she’s being a dath ilani protagonist now, but she doesn’t want to be the only one in this story, that’s not very fair 

He will speak slowly and carefully and be ready to wait if interrupted.

"Problem one.  Hell would not like me praying to most Lawful Neutral gods.  Exceptions:  Erecura, who dwells in Hell.  Primordial inevitables tasked with maintaining Creation, like Jerishall, who oversees how planets go around suns.  Neither seems like a god who'd like me."

"Problem two.  It's unlikely any Outer God, even the one that brought us here, would pass on a message to a god, from a mortal."

"Problem three.  To do any of this, you would need to pray to an Outer God.  This is widely considered a bad, stupid, no good, very wrong idea.  Kills you, kills people next to you, kills everyone in your city, powerful adventurers have to clean up your mess.  Outer Gods might not be able to not drive people insane.  Just looking at one will damage your Wisdom and that's if It's sincerely trying to be friendly."

Merrin does not interrupt. She’s following all of that without too much difficulty.

….She’s dubious of the last bit and she’s not…sure why…? The claim that it’s cognitohazardous to interact with Outer Gods came up early on, and was something that Esta clearly took seriously; there’s no particular reason to flag it as doomgod doomcountry misinformation, and certainly it doesn’t conflict with anything else in the model of Golarion she’s formed from Esta’s reports. When she queries her brain on it, it seems entirely plausible to her that Esta’s concern here is sincere, and not just something that he’s supposed to think to impress Asmodeus. And yet, it still isn’t quite landing?

Esta’s main objection to praying to other gods is still that Asmodeus wouldn’t approve. 

Merrin finds herself carrying out a mental motion something like “considering whether or not to be frustrated and demoralized by that, and deciding against.” She doesn’t have to be mad at him! Even if most reasonable people in her position would be! It’s no one’s business but her own! 

It’s oddly relaxing to remember that. 

She sits down across from Esta, to convey that she’s not intending to flee this conversation at the first opportunity, and nods agreeably. “Bad clever idea,” she says cheerfully, “not a plan. Yet.”

After a pause, “So I was thinking about - what it says about this game - that the people brought here were you and me, and the places we come from - or remember coming from, at least - are dath ilan and Cheliax. To me, coming from dath ilan, it feels like a story where I should become a #legendary hero# and keep you out of #Hell#.” 

She swaps in the Taldane word; it’s one that stuck in her head, and the appropriate Baseline translations are ones that Esta had less exposure to. Hell, of course, does not straightforwardly have a Baseline translation at all.

“But that’s me,” she adds. “It must feel like a different story, to you.” 

She shrugs. “That might be wrong for how to think about it, because #Outer Gods# are not like people in dath ilan or in Cheliax. But it’s a way to try to think of what the #Outer God# might want.”

"Why are you thinking that the Outer God wants to tell a story from dath ilan?  If this were a story from Cheliax about a man and a woman, you would be trying to get me to like you, using your body, and then kill me or #enslave# me -- force me to do what you say all the time."

That’s kind of hilarious actually. 

IS IT REALLY, KALORM. 

- well, that does seem to be a more pleasant-for-her way to react than being uncomfortable and perhaps slightly offended, so sure, thank you Kalorm, reframe appreciated.

…You know, it’s not actually obvious to Laeirthe that that genre couldn’t exist in dath ilan? It’s probably not for public consumption, but sadist women exist and some of them are aware of that fact about themselves.