She really is! She’s so much cooler than this obnoxious Estha guy. 

Remind her HOW and WHY she ended up with these imaginary people in her head gossiping about their weird grudge against her boyfriend????? What's Kalorm's problem with Estha? 

Honestly, it’s mostly the part where Merrin cares way too much about his approval. Kalorm liked it better in Merrin’s head when there was literally no one else on the planet who she could even conceivably look to as a respected authority figure who she thinks is smarter than her. Her brain does this thing about it and Kalorm has an allergy.

…To be clear he’s not judging her on the masochism thing, she gets to have fun however she wants with whoever she wants, just, it would be neat if she could have her fun with her sadist boyfriends without being weird about it like that. 

She's not doing it at you, Kalorm, she's just kind of shaped like that, and it seems like it was fine and perfectly compatible with being a happy, well-adjusted person in dath ilan? 

"In dath ilan" being operative, there. 

...Anyway, Laeirthe started out with mostly just...generic paranoia, because he is a generically paranoid character-model...and it wasn't really specific to Estha at all, it was just irritating him that Merrin is so trusting. 

BUT Laeirthe has now been “awake” long enough to have gotten a good look at Merrin’s thought patterns on the topic, and…has she noticed that’s she’s doing kind of a lot of motivated cognition around every observation she made that didn’t quite feel right? Understandably, maybe, because she was alone and scared for a long time and she wants that to be over, but - she can see that she is doing it, right? 

Um.

Can he give examples. 

...It was a sort of wordless gestalt impression of a weight tugging her one direction more than another, more than an explicit reasoned logical case, but of course Laeirthe can go consider it more closely now, that's a very sensible idea. 

Eventually: 

Here is a broken-down list of specific times where, Laeirthe is claiming, Merrin felt uneasy or uncomfortable or worried, and then forgot about it or declared it not worth spending more time thinking about as soon as she could reasonably get away with that. 

1. The inexplicable language barrier. The abrupt lifting of the inexplicable language barrier, followed by some bizarre word choices that Merrin also doesn’t think resembled the usual, expected disfluency from after a resolving neurological-injury-caused aphasia, and instead - hmm, does Laeirthe in fact know how these things work well enough to draw conclusions - (low-confidence flag) that resembled someone who was, somehow, trying to express normal dath ilani concepts in normal Baseline when neither was fully familiar or comfortable?

2. Laeirthe thinks that Merrin might just be flat-out wrong to expect the Estha she knows to have performed better overall, on arrival to a strange planet, but it does seem like Merrin felt confused and uneasy about something there? Laeirthe's argument here isn't that her unease was valid, just that the grounds on which she ignored it were suspiciously motivated-reasoning-shaped.

3. Estha was confidently claiming in quite a pushy way to be less susceptible to mind-control than Merrin, while himself seeming rather impaired? 

4. Merrin chose to question him on his memory of her True Death, on the grounds that this was a useful cognitive assessment for amnesia, and he in fact didn't remember it, and his explanation for what happened instead was throwing all of Laeirthe’s “that’s a load of flaming crap” suspicion alarms. Which might, to be clear, be miscalibrated here! Laeirthe has priors shaped from paranoia and paranoia is not necessarily in all cases truth-tracking! He doesn't confidently know that Merrin's memory is the true one, here, just - Merrin did run a test and did find the result concerning and then just sort of dropped thinking about it? 

5. The vibes were off. Laeirthe is to be clear, not himself qualified to speak on that, but Merrin was troubled by it, and Merrin would know! She had an intimate relationship with the man! “Interpersonal vibes” may not be a type of evidence that Laeirthe is personally inclined to put much weight on, but Merrin seems to in general put some trust in her ability to tell what’s going on with someone. Apparently it’s relevant to her job or something? And she thought something was wrong.

Okay. 

...And? 

So maybe she should continue to be suspicious for a while? 

Suspicious....of....what....? 

Laeirthe continues to not contain any answers that Merrin herself doesn't already know! 

Just...different heuristic responses to the same information state, apparently, and his heuristics are SCREAMING that Merrin is being way too trusting and insufficiently paranoid and she should not be taking everything Estha says at face value even thought she apparently REALLY WANTS TO. 

....She's tracking that Estha might have brain damage or something and be more wrong than her about what actually happened? 

And Laeirthe is saying that that is NOT BEING ADEQUATELY SUSPICIOUS given their information state right now!

Look, Merrin already knew that Reality construed broadly was larger and weirder than she had previously conceived of, right? Because she did not arrive here via faster-than-light space travel, which could conceivably exist within the standard physical reality she knew of. She arrived here in a way that involved apparently dying and then - leaving? the Reality that held dath ilan? and continuing to exist, in some…larger…Reality…? One that contains strange coincidences, like planets with exactly the most challenging conditions under which Merrin specifically with her exact background and level of preparation can, just barely, survive, and implausibly dramatic timing for epic river rescues. 

What if it contains even stranger things than that. 

Like, just to take a random example, places where conceptualmagic is real, including the mind control part. 

What if…such a world were to have some sort of entity that could, for example, take over bodies and gain imperfect, fragmented access to the host's memories, and then try to fake nothing being wrong in order to gain the cooperation of someone close to their host? 

(This is a low-hanging hypothesis to Laeirthe for the obvious reason that the exactly how his fictional-character instance manages to be immortal.) 

That's extremely silly. 

Laeirthe is just saying, Merrin should be broadening her hypothesis space to include more possibilities that might fit with her observations to date, even if they're weird, because she already knows that the situation is weird in ways she can't explain. 

What if…an alien shapeshifter, with mentalistmagic mindreading powers that let them sneak up on Merrin and contrive a story to fake that would be the most likely to get her cooperation? But they did it imperfectly, thus the vibes being off, and also they’re doing an imperfect job of pretending to have human biology, and trying to cover up their fumbles there by bluffing about cognitohazards? 

Or, who knows, maybe the man she rescued was, at one point, Estha, as she knew him, and it’s just that unlike her he did encounter a cognitohazardous entity with mind-editing abilities, but Merrin wasn’t there? Like, one part that seems off here is that as described the supposed cognitohazardous entity did not, it seems, even try to conceal having messed with Estha's head, and Estha seems to arrive kind of impaired in a way that Merrin wasn't on her arrival or she would be dead, having had no one showing up ahead of her to rescue her? And maybe Estha's entire memory of Merrin having been there with him is confabulated, along with a whole lot of random other things about his own life history, and also contact with the entity messed with his biology and he’s no longer precisely human for medical purposes? 

There, that’s a less paranoid theory, is she happy now? Under this new theory, Merrin doesn’t even have to assume Estha is an adversary! Just that she should not be deferring to him on epistemic questions of what happened to her in the past or what her life history contains, or trusting his judgement on concrete survival questions where her own expert judgement disagrees. 

She’s not very happy, no. 

All of this is…not the kind of thing Merrin knows how to reason about, okay?

She’s good at what she does, she'll admit that much. The thing she does is medicine. She in fact simply is not qualified to have good ideas or judgement when it comes to bizarre larger-Reality hypotheticals? It feels like quicksand to try to think about it, and also she has a literal headache now from all of the IMAGINARY PEOPLE who are ARGUING IN HER HEAD, which is itself a state that does kind of make Merrin feel like her sanity ought not be trusted here? 

...She's not actually worried about the last thing, though, not really, she understands what happened here and how. She just doesn't want to have to do exhausting cognitive work, but she's smarter than that and she knows better. Laeirthe knows her, see, he's made out of her. 

And, unfortunately, the situation is what it is, and Merrin is not in dath ilan anymore, and maybe in dath ilan it made sense to throw problems outside her core skillset at the extremely competent Governance authorities, to be solved by the appropriate department, but she doesn’t have that option anymore.  

Look, Laeirthe doesn’t have answers, either? 

Just questions. 

And he's staking out a VERY STRONG BID for Merrin to take those questions seriously, and keep asking them and checking hypotheses, and not leave it at “probably Estha is right about everything, since she’s not qualified to have opinions on non-medical topics so how would she know better.” 

but mmmmrgg she doesn't wanna she wants everything to be okay and safe and she's not alone anymore and she gets to be happy now 

...and that is a thought that Merrin can catch as a wrongthought just fine on her own, thank you.

Grumble. Grumps. Mrgggllblrggg. 

...Okay, she's done her internal whining.

The voice of an imaginary fictional character from her fanfiction talking in her head does, kind of, have some reasonable points. 

Merrin is going to lie here for another five minutes not thinking any thoughts, because that was really, really exhausting, she did not know just lying still pretending to be asleep and thinking thoughts could be that exhausting. 

And then she'll cautiously try to extract herself from the sleeping bag, without disturbing Estha (probably Estha?) if he seems to still be asleep. 

Real adventurers who sleep through that sort of thing are dead.  (Wizards have to be guarded by real adventurers.)

He won't particularly react or open his eyes, just yet; Esta will observe the course of events that happens by default, attempting to breathe slowly, at what he has been told is his sleeping breathing-pace.

(His heart rate or blood pressure may well pick up.  Esta is not used to having to fool Dark Tapestry medical instrumentation.)

In any other circumstances, Merrin would almost certainly not even ask herself the question 'is Estha pretending to be asleep so he can see what I do when I don't think he's watching', because - in her opinion, at least - that's such a silly sort of thing to spend your cognition on wondering. 

BUT Merrin sure has, herself, just spent LIKE AN HOUR pretending to be asleep while having an argument with her– an argument inside her brain, she's in fact not sure she can reasonably conceptualize it as 'with herself', what even was that.

She checks the monitors instinctively and...does go 'hmm' to herself about it, a little. Maybe she's completely making it up and Estha picked that moment to transition into REM sleep from deep sleep.....orrrrr maybe he also feels like something is off and he needs to be paranoid about her? 

She can't think of anything to do differently if he might be sneakily listening to her while pretending to be asleep, so she will do exactly what she would normally do, which is go pee in the bucket (stored under the wicker table where she had laid out his costume jewelry, so she can't kick it over by accident) and get some water for herself, while considering which of her local-biomass foodstuffs feels the least unappealing right now. 

Why eat SNAILS when she can eat BLANDLY GENERICAL MAGICAL FOOD?