"I.... the exact ratios and numbers I cannot share, but there are far too many catastrophic disasters as civilizations advance in technology and magic."  His voice is solemn.

"Depending on how similar the Earths are, a detailed account of your Earth's recent history could be very valuable... although it would take something extreme to actually motivate breaking the non-intervention equilibrium on this reality's Earth."

A runner has come down for the inquisitor waiting for them at the end of the hall.  He looks over at Jon expectantly and then looks away.

"A runner came with a message, they may have news for us, maybe Terendelev is ready with the limited wish... would you be willing to let me retain this conversation?"

He doesn't want to push her but there are several different deadlines at work... Tanya's chest wound and Terendelev returning to continue the fight in Kenabres are the major time limits.  It is not as urgent, but he needs to confer with Terendelev and Tanya on whether to allow his calling to expire or to extend it out to days.

Tanya needs their help, at least in the short term, which means she needs to trust them. And if she's trusting them anyway, and has no backup plan in case they betray her, then she might as well trust them with this information. Jon didn't react badly; he could hide any reaction if he chose; so this is the best result she could have gotten, and she should go ahead.

"Yes. Please remember everything I told you and act on it in our mutual interests. I intend to share it with Terendelev and possibly other locals later, with your help in omitting dangerous details. And it seems I can't leave this cursed orb behind yet, but I would like your and Terendelev's help in fixing that."

On their way out she can try the different combinations of placing the orb, herself, or neither in an antimagic field and increasing the distance between them, while using or not using her regular orb, in case this provides any useful information.

The inquisitor also has a small lead lined box that hermetically seals.  So Tanya can also see if it helps at all.

She gets the same effect of increasing pain with distance whether or not the orb is in an antimagic field.  After confirming to the inquisitor it normally needs to be activated to have any adverse effect, he tries moving it away while Tanya is in an antimagic field.  There is no pain while Tanya is an antimagic field, but pain matching the distance returns the moment she steps out.

The lead lined box has no effect.  Using her other orb maybe very faintly reduces the pain compared to not using it?  It’s hard to tell, but she can get a bit further before the pain gets crippling.

“The lead lined box is still worthwhile, it blocks many forms of divination magic from detecting the orb or getting information anything about it.  Golarion magic items normally do not function in antimagic fields, they have to be artifacts, meaning a God or semi-divine power created them or augmented them at some point.  So maybe Areelu, she is at least semi-divine at this point with the way her spells cheat the limits.  Or maybe ‘Being X’ counts as at least semi-divine.  It is interesting the curse can be blocked on your end… maybe it is closer to more typical magic?”

Tanya has some thoughts regarding that, but she'll save them for later, they're on a clock. When they rejoin Terendelev, she's all business.

"I agreed to Jon remembering and sharing what I told him. He has some concerns about information that might be harmful to spread locally so he'll be helping me sanitize it before passing it on, but I don't intend to withhold anything material. Recovering my memories still seems indicated and may help with that."

"We also discovered that separating me from the cursed orb causes the wound to hurt until I cannot function, and I can point out the orb's direction when this happens. Putting me in an antimagic field stops this effect, putting the orb in one doesn't."

“I have a scroll of telepathic bond.  I’ll cast it on the three of us before we continue, just as an extra precaution.”

She casts it.

That would suggest your orb is an artifact.  And if distance from the orb matters for your wound… from what I saw with Analyze Dweomer I would also guess distance to the worldwound matters for your wound, and getting closer might moderate it or stop it.  But that would also make you an easier target for Areelu Vorlesh.

Anyway, I think your memories should be our next priority, since they may reveal something relevant?  I have the scroll now.  Unless the things you explained to Jon should come first?

I think a very abbreviated version should come first, but afterwards if we can recover any relevant memories that would help me explain. There is an - actor, which I named Being X. He may or may not be a 'god' as understood locally. Jon cautioned me not to give out any other details without checking with him.

The cursed orb cannot be used normally by me or anyone else from my planet, it was a research dead-end. Being X interfered so that if I pray to him and pretend to worship him he enables me to use the orb, which has far greater power than my usual one. He also mind-controls me if I do it enough and - let's say it wouldn't be me, and I can't be sure what would happen. Obviously I don't intend to use it ever again. 

Our local enemy may be Being X or someone else working with him or separately. They made me unable to destroy or discard the orb and so I suspect they plan for me to use it. If recovering my memories makes me try to use it, you should stop me, and - well, if I thought this could happen I wouldn't ask you to recover them, but in the spirit of completeness, if it does happen I suppose I would want you to remove those memories again. - I will stop using my regular orb when you cast the spell.

Yes, a standard countermeasure for less well known Evil Gods is to simply censor information about them.

She was slightly worried it was some Dark Tapestry thing before Tanya clarified.

Would Being X align itself with Areelu?  I guess we can try to figure that out after you recover your memories…

There actually isn’t a standard, available, known spell for removing large sections of memories without total amnesia.  I know of an obscure spell that does 5 minute section of memory.  Areelu Vorlesh presumably invented or discovered something stronger, but I don’t have it.  I can explain the wordings and effects of the options for a limited wish to restore memories, I really don’t think any of them would subvert or hijack your current personality and we can pick the most conservative wording.

To clarify, the abilities I have over my own memories aren’t discrete spells but instead techniques that take decades to centuries to instill and learn.

Oh. That's - disappointing, tactically, but of course it's otherwise good news that normal people don't have memory-editing spells to go along with their mind-control ones! 

Please explain the wordings. ...Another fact that may be relevant is that when I used the cursed orb, before I knew better, what I'm glossing as Being X's mind control also made my memory poor and gappy until the effect ended. I thought at first that my current memory loss may be for the same reason, before you told me about Areelu, and it may still turn out to be related.

I’ll speak aloud since you have translation magic.  So the three most standard wordings I know of are:

“As a restoration of the mind so cast this spell.” (Terendelev speaks this in a singing sort of rhyme and there are a few extra sounds she makes between words.) 

This wording gets an effect somewhere between a Restoration and Greater Restoration but only effecting the mind.  It is notably useful when there is physical damage to the brain itself contributing to problems.

“Iwishforallpermanentdebuffsandmalusestoberemovedinsofaraseachremovaldoesnotcauseotherharms.” (She speaks in 6 languages as one massive run-on sentence with lots of extra sounds between words.  And it appears to have some sort of regular poetic meter even as she speaks incredibly fast.)

This wording is heavily optimized in its inclusion of verbal components and is suitable for cases where there is an ongoing permanent spell that cannot be removed by a more ordinary dispel magic or remove curse.  It’s irrelevant in your case because I did not see any ongoing memory-affecting spells with my casting of Analyze Dweomer.

“UNDO the instantaneous AND permanent HARMS to this MIND.” (She speaks with strong enunciations and emphases.)

This one is elegant, but depends on having discrete harms, long term sustained effects not attributable to particular spells can sometimes be unaffected by it.

And the four obscure wordings - actually, does your style of magic not include any verbal components?  I was going to compare and contrast how the wordings double as semantic components and how that contributes to the spell, but if you don’t have even the basics of verbal components in your magic tradition the explanation would be wasted and I should stick to summaries of the end results.

This is kind of a digression but if it was her mind being subject to a limited wish she would want the details!

For once he isn’t the one going on a digression!

Our spells don't have 'verbal components', Tanya thinks flatly, because they are engineered to produce effects without having to propitiate the gods.

What's next, an obscure wording that adds 'please'? Maybe tuck in an 'oh Lord' somewhere? Tanya hates to see what dependence on 'divine' magic has done to these people.

...I do want details, not just summaries, but I assume I should hear your analysis and not try to guess at the results of different wordings.

That… that isn’t how verbal components work. At all.  And obviously not how limited wish or wish work, even though they were reverse engineered from miracle - I’ll save the magic lecture for later.

She’s kind of shocked someone so evidently skilled at magic could make that mistake but if someone’s never used a single verbal component or glanced at so much as a summary of the relevant spell diagram - she focuses on the task at hand.

The two of those three standard wording have clear drawbacks for your use case, Areelu might have used some long drawn out process such as an alchemical concoction, so the third wording isn’t sure to work.  There is no ongoing permanent spell, so the second wording doesn’t work.  The first wording is very reliable, and even restoring very very traumatic memories it isn’t known to cause madness, but if you want even more security against such a case, two of the nonstandard wordings I know of are particularly suitable.

The first restores lost memories in a dry factual way, as if reading them from a book and looking at pictures instead of directly experiencing them.  It has the disadvantage that the exact emotional valence is often not restored, but that would be an advantage in your case.  It also has the advantage that certain details, like written or spoken precise numerical quantities actually come through clearer.

The second restores lost memories with a sort of dream-like haze over them, heavily blunting any trauma or pain.  Especially painful memories can be rendered too hazy to get much detail from.  Also, heavy mind magic used within memories takes on weird metaphorical symbolic overlays in the memory.  It also has the side effect of making you remember all your dreams for up to the next year and a day.

Tanya is not amenable to being persuaded by the local religious hicks that the laws of the universe understand and obey human speech in actual specific languages!!!

She has no reason to pick this fight, now or ever. The only relevant question is: is this spell going to get her in trouble? Since all local magic was originally taught by the 'gods', and they insist it is reliable, and the gods are running a surveillance state and have had their attention drawn to Tanya already... it's hopefully safe to use a spell that goes directly into the ear of some divine bureaucrat who 'reliably' interprets and grants wishes. Safer than the alternatives, anyway.

The first non-standard variant you described seems clearly best suited. Is there a reason to prefer one of the others that I am missing?

Have you experienced any cognitive issues suggestive of damage to your brain?  My heal probably got any of that sort of damage, but if you have any sense of nausea, agitation, loss of coordination, or problems with maintaining wakefulness that could indicate persistent damage that one of the other wordings might better suited to address.  Assuming the answer is no, I will cast the limited wish now.

Tanya takes a few seconds to think, because one does not brush off a doctor. She doesn't remember any unusual problems - not recent ones, anyway, and the older ones she attributed to exhaustion all went away eventually. She certainly isn't agitated, considering the circumstances. And she started today feeling completely rested, like coming back from a few days' vacation, and went on feeling that way until her wound reopened. 

I didn't experience anything like that either today or during the last previous period I can remember. I can't rule out brain damage during the period of lost memories, and it might even be a plausible cause of memory loss if magic wasn't involved, but it does not seem likely. It is possible that I suffered some mild brain trauma at some point during the war but if so it did not impair my performance afterwards and it is very unlikely to have been specifically during the last half-year that I do remember.

Alright, I'll go ahead with the wish then.  It may take a few moments for the memories to come together.

"This mind as a book, its lost pages restored, its contents MADE WHOLE."  (This is in yet another language.)

At first it feels almost like nothing happened, then some stray association catches in Tanya's mind.  The oldest lost memories (her time as a baby immediately after reincarnation, her periods of time lost to the Type 95 Orb) and her most recent lost memories are noticeable first.

In her most recent lost memory she is being puppeteered by a woman (or demon, now that Tanya has that context) that looks like one of the Succubi, with wings and horns.  The puppeteering is mostly to keep her still as the woman carefully restores her body, cutting her hair to the exact length it last was, carefully trimming her nails, dressing her back again in her uniform, and (apparently) checking over Tanya's thoughts for any discrepancies that might stand out.  The woman is taking notes to herself, speaking to some recording device.  The exact notes the woman took don't quite come through even though Tanya apparently had the translation spells at this point, but some of the woman's mannerisms do.  She repeatedly refers to Tanya as the 'test subject'.  A few disconnected experimental measurements stand out in memory:  compatibility at 35%, [unclear memory] absorption nearly absolute at 98% and 24 [illegible number], healing rate 1 [illegible unit] per round, mythic linkages at 5 [illegible unit] for a full 1/10th. The date the woman notes also comes through very clearly: 15th of Arodus 4718.  It is a noticeable fact that Tanya's chest lightly throbs in the memory.

The memories come as Tanya thinks of related facts, the pain and trauma and suffering reduced to easily managed factual data associated with each memory.  Among the memories:

• Being puppeteered through various tests: firing optical spells, flying at various accelerations, demonstrating various other spells.  If Tanya thinks through them she might notice a failure to really push her limits on what she can do.  And the tests are careful not to expend any limited resources like her bullets.
• An attempt at puppeting Tanya to test/demonstrate the Type 95 Orb, with Tanya managing to break free of the control for a few desperate moments before being controlled again.  A strong feeling of hope is notable as a disconnected fact about the memory.  There is only one such memory, in all the other memories using an orb it is the Type 97.
• Various injections, surgeries, infusions, and rituals, often focused around the wound in Tanya's chest, with the Type 95 Orb often in close conjunction nearby.  Some of them heal Tanya, some of them reopen the chest wound, and some cause raw magic to pour out of the wound at rates that are impossible according to the limits of mana capacity and generation that Tanya knows.
• Being carefully and precisely interviewed, with the aid of mind control and mind reading magic.  The woman doesn't quite ask the right question to really grasp the implications of the power of Tanya's magic or the industrial and scientific scale of her world.  Oddly, many of the questions seem like bizarre personality quizzes, down to asking inane things like her favorite foods or types of music.
• At one point, the woman forces Tanya to pray to Being X while in the middle of a complex ritual diagram.  There is seemingly no effect.

The woman took meticulous verbal notes, but sadly, the language translation wasn't something Tanya had for most of it, the woman's notes are mostly lost to Tanya.  However, dates and disconnected experimental measurements come through clearly enough that with the translation Tanya has now she can interpret them. Tanya can also remember the woman's magic, with many of her spells notably stronger than Terendelev's spells.

The restoration of the memories actually leaves the exact order of memories slightly ambiguous, but if Tanya is careful to review them and match them to the date, she might manage to get a guess at a few years passing.  The obvious implication is that she was unconscious for most of it, with perhaps less than 30 conscious days across the surgeries/rituals (most of which happened first, although there were a few scattered follow-ups), the "interviews", and the tests of Tanya's magic.

Finally, the memory of how she came to Golarion comes through.  In the memory, Tanya is pulled away, by a sensation somewhat like the teleport she has recently experienced, but impossibly stronger.  The memory ends abruptly, it seems she was rendered unconscious before she could manage a single spell, with only a glimpse of the woman that would be her captor.

It is indeed for the best that the wording did not restore emotional clarity.

...

The world is so much simpler and clearer when you once again have an enemy in front of you, a legitimate target you are supposed to kill for non-personal reasons that align perfect with your incentives, and that enemy is going down.

It is not a better world. Tanya would much rather stay safely in the rear to write books on Earth technology. But it is a world in which it feels much easier to dismiss nonsense religions as unimportant.

"Got her," she says triumphantly, and displays an illusion image of the woman from her memories.

There are many memories and details to go over, including from the lost period on the Rhine.

I will need more time to review everything, she sends to Terendelev, is there a spell for directly sharing selected memories? You will probably notice or understand details I can't.

I remember her abducting me from Earth, and she appears to have had me for years, since 4715. Tanya doesn't remember the local date but the memories themselves include a range of three years; the war back home must be long over. This is - surprisingly distressing, but it also means it is not urgent to go back. If she's going to go back. (Why would she go back? - never mind, it is not urgent! Focus.)

I do not have nearly enough memories to cover that period. I remember her mind-controlling me, doing various things to me, and saying various things to herself. She knows my abilities with the orb, possibly not to their full extent. She tried and failed to make me successfully use the cursed orb. 

What is the likelihood that some or all of the memories are fake or tampered? Or that she could control which memories I would recover? Or that someone else could and used this to frame her, whether or not they were working together? ...even if the memories are true the events could have been faked with illusions, or maybe with some application of mind control. Is there any way to rule that out, or did we learn only what the enemy wanted us to learn? It it was Areelu would she not have predicted that I could recover memories in this way?

That appears to be Areelu Vorlesh.  I… did she tell the date?  Or leave a calendar visible somewhere?  I absolutely would not trust that even if the memories are themselves not fake.  It seems like a trivial lie.  As for the recovered memories themselves that wish wording shouldn’t restore purely fabricated memories… but technically speaking an immersive illusion, hallucination, or mindscape that you actually experienced would count as a ‘real’ memory.  When you have time, thinking through the memories carefully… I think there are tricks you could do with hallucinations to make it seem like more time passed than was actually experienced.  I think it would require micromanagement by Areelu.  And… I think witch spellcasting simply isn’t as good at Illusions, some illusions simply won’t stabilize for them, but I’m not sure about the particular illusion spells she might have used.  And Areelu might have figured out some way around that sort of limitation of normal witch Spellcasting entirely.

Also… if she had two methods of memory suppression or erasure, one beatable with a limited wish, and one not, she could have used two different methods deliberately?  I don’t think that’s outright impossible, and if anyone could pull it off Areelu could.  It would be convoluted, but she’s pulled off some elaborate plots before.

She had you prisoner the entire time?  There wasn’t anytime outside of her power we could follow up with for a lead?  I guess for immediately actionable items… checking over the details of your memories carefully for any inconsistencies that might suggest you were in some form of illusion.  We could try another limited wish, but I think if this method didn’t get any hint of anything else we shouldn’t expect any additional success, we would need a Wish to improve on it.

She has an exciting thought.

Areelu was likely holding you in her demiplane.  If you you could learn to cast off scrolls, or even just share enough memory with me or another spellcaster, we could raid Areelu’s demiplane, Gating in a prepared strike force.  It would be incredibly risky, even with the advantage of time to prebuff, a demiplane under her control would likely have all sorts of traps and an advantageously prepared environment.