"...Huh," Merrin says.

Her own social instincts feel like it is, at this point, WEIRD AND AWKWARD not to reciprocate and offer her own memories, which are really very much not that.

But.

She's getting less verbal Laeirthe-commentary, now, it seems like actively having a conversation out loud is interfering with that thread - makes sense, having an actual conversation with another person would engage her social-modeling, which is presumably also what she was using to ACCIDENTALLY SUMMON A FICTIONAL CHARACTER INTO HER BRAIN who has now informed her that he ???likes existing and wants to stay???? - anyway she does have a nonverbal-tug sense that Laeirthe thinks she should not hand maybe-Estha information that he hasn't even explicitly asked for. 

"Can you tell me what specifically you've noticed that seems different about me now?" she asks him, going for an affect of 'curious, and like it's niggling and making her uneasy that she doesn't know which parts of her were edited', which is easy because she is curious and it is niggling and it's just that she's not, actually, as convinced as she's aiming to sound that the discrepancy is within her own memories and not - elsewhere. 

He should probably not, perhaps, say, 'You were originally Lawful Evil rather than Chaotic Good', even leaving aside the part where this language has no simple term for Evil.  Helms of opposite alignment are probably mythical, since if they existed they would be used to win wars; but the myth told of them does make sense, that once somebody goes under one they no longer want to go back.

"You are much more expressive than the Merrin I knew, for one thing.  Our department -- 'taught' is the wrong word.  Required much more emotional control, from its employees."

Oh no is she being uncanny and wrongvibes for him too? Merrin is aware that she shows more emotion than many people and it's mostly because she has louder emotions than other people, but being expressive about her positive emotions is, like, fine? Or at least that's what her memories would seem to indicate? 

"My memories are that my work required me to be able to control my negative emotions," she says thoughtfully. "Both in terms of facial expressions," because in an emergency the last thing anyone needs is for Merrin to be facescreaming upsetness, "and - cognitive effects?" She's great at experiencing minimal cognitive effects from situations being terrifying, for example. She's proud of that. "I think I do experience happiness more easily than most people, and I find that useful so I've never tried to change how much I show it."

She spends a moment considering whether it's actually in her interests to say the thing she wants to say to actual Estha who has cognitohazard-induced brain damage, when in fact she should be paranoid that it's not actual Estha and is instead a shapeshifting alien. ...It doesn't seem like there's a huge cost to saying it to a shapeshifting alien? She's not very good at this adversarial thing and it's very exhausting but she doesn't think it's giving away information she should keep to herself as long as possible? 

"....I can try to stop if it's - distracting - for you," she offers. "I don't want to be making everything harder for you, if that isn't what you're used to from me." 

He's used to her making some things harder, in several senses of that word, actually.

Esta is not going to say this to the underclothed girl who has climbed into a sleeping bag with him, for as many as several reasons; one of which is that it might actually be a bad thing if Mariona picked this exact time to get pregnant.

"I expect you are already worrying about a sufficient number of distinct problems and that this is not the correct concern for you to prioritize.  Also it's not going to work, I can read you better than you can conceal.  --at least, I remember being able to."

Sure, Merrin believes that - or, at least, would believe it about the Estha she remembers knowing -  but there's still a difference between 'he can tell that he's feeling something' and 'she is loudly and obtrusively feeling it AT him'!

She's not going to argue, though. "Okay," she says, and then - if he doesn't immediately interrupt, she's going to be quiet and thoughtful for a minute here, because she's apparently out of practice at having conversations and is feeling like it's oddly hard to hear her own thoughts at the same time. 

He has a valid point that she's already tracking a very large number of distinct problems, but - something about the way he said it feels off - she thinks her Estha wouldn't describe it as 'worrying', for one, and would give her more credit than that for tracking her own cognitive bandwidth and only offering something that she judged she could do without trading off against her more critical priorities? Maybe she couldn't have done that yet when she was in her teens (and apparently this Estha remembers meeting her then? oh no she was so much worse at things when she was younger!), but current Merrin has trained really quite extensively at juggling enormous numbers of overwhelming problems, and at pushing back on the things she experiences as soft social pressure to agree to additional duties she cannot effectively carry out, because her Exception Handling instructors were not wrong that this was one of her weaknesses. 

Also she thinks her Estha would foreground more to what extent it even bothered him, if it did, and they would do the usual 'roughly quantify how much this bothers him, versus what it costs her', and it feels odd for him to instead just inform her that he's declaring this not one of her priorities?

...She's not very confident of that. For her it's been eight months since she last saw him, and she's probably very out of practice at the social-modeling thing, at least when it comes to actual people and not pretend ones. 

It's still evidence, though. 

...Did she catch the thing where she's now thinking of 'her' Estha as a disambiguation from this Estha? 

Look Merrin was about to get there with 'it's still evidence even if it's not conclusive', can Laeirthe be patient please

...She hadn't quite consciously noticed that, no, but it's - hmm. 

What does she think she knows, and why does she think she knows it? 

Well. Estha - this Estha - unambiguously has some sort of bizarre some-sort-of-magic abilities. Merrin isn't quite sure how to categorize them according to fictional tropes for magic because he's...actually been quite vague about how it works? 

What did he say. He said that he remembered her also having the abilities, albeit being less talented, which does make sense to her, if hypothethically she and Estha both had weird magicalabilities then of course he would be better at it.

He said he'd been one of her instructors, early on. Needless to say, this absolutely does not map to anything in Merrin's own memories. She didn't even meet Estha until - it would have been after she met Kalorm, later the same year...

He said that Baseline lacked any vocabulary for - it - whatever 'it' is. He said, we dealt with...entities, there's no longer a word for them, or what they do, or how to interact with them.

Merrin does not need Laeirthe, this time, to point out that she should have paid more attention to that, and to what hypotheses it's evidence for or against. 

(It's hard to keep thinking this when she feels like Estha might at any moment interrupt and, like, ask if she's okay or something.) 

...If dath ilan knew about this...phenomenon...then Merrin would really expect Baseline to have words for it! Not words she would know, just like she didn't know the word for 'masochist' until a few years ago, and maybe whatever Estha is doing is only giving him vocabulary she has and not the vocabulary he previously had and lost? But that doesn't land right, somehow. 

If 'Estha' were an alien shapeshifter or a bodysnatching immortal trying to obtain her cooperation, it seems like it would be a bizarre unforced error to give her such a specific backstory that so clearly doesn't fit into the contours of the life she remembers? 

He remembers her being less expressive. She's mostly made happy expressions in his presence, she thinks, so far? It feels like it has to mean something, that the context he remembers is one where it's not just 'bursting into tears in an operating room' that one needs to be trained to suppress, but also being visibly delighted when a patient recovers better than expected? No one has ever told Merrin to be less visibly delighted when a patient is doing well, though possibly they avoided giving her patients who would disprefer that for some reason. 

It definitely feels like after that interaction, Merrin has more facts and, as result, understands fewer things.

It feels like it pushes away from all of her hypotheses, toward...something...else...? 

Estha doesn't seem hostile? Which is not proof that he isn't, as opposed to just being more skillful at hiding it than she is at noticing, but her surface impression is that he seems...confused, just like she is, and also confusing, which apparently she also is to him, and apart from that he's on team 'survive the horrible exoplanet.' 

Esta has previously learned that he tends to get more of what he wants if he lets Mariona go quiet and think occasionally; and that trying to punish her into arriving at the same conclusions faster doesn't actually yield the results he wants.  (It is annoying to him; and it's more annoying that this seems to be actually the way she is, and not a clever strategem to frustrate him; and it's even more annoying that he can't solve the problem by applying more pain, not in mortal Golarion.  There are days when it feels quite obvious and intuitive how much hate Asmodeus must have stored up for mortals.)

But even considering that Merrin is of uncertain obedience and more uncertain defeatability if offended, there are things that must be done and soon.  He will, then, interrupt her thinking.  "I do not know what tasks we must do today in order to merely survive, but my own highest priority is reacquiring the expanding-space bag that was on my waist when I was struck by the tidal bore.  It was protected by a metal mesh, but if it has been destroyed or simply lost beyond retrieval, then getting off this planet and back to Civilization becomes much harder.  Is it perchance only stored by you, somewhere I could not see?"

Esta makes a note that he needs to later ponder that word his concept of 'civilization' translated into; there is weight behind it in Tongues and Cultural Adaptation.  It sounds... mainly it sounds like those things you are allowed to learn of the slain god Aroden, after Asmodeus admits you to his 4th circle.

(Merrin is aware that it would normally have been polite to flag that she wanted a minute to think - and she would have with Estha, her Estha, normally - and it's just that it's weird and awkward to be in this strange half-cooperative half-adversarial stance. She doesn't like it.) 

...She's also realizing that, wow, she has really gotten used to - not being rushed? Certainly not by anyone else, but her own schedule has included a lot of enforced nothing, and a lot of what she's been finding to spend her time on isn't even survival-critical anymore. She's just bored. 

But it makes sense that Estha is worried about– ohhhhhh. 

Wait he has a WHAT. 

"I'm sorry, I definitely haven't seen it," she says, rather than immediate pepper him with ten questions that might turn out to be impossible to answer with Baseline vocabulary anyway. "I think it must have gotten separated from you before I pulled you out of the water. ...I'm not sure what our odds are of finding it, even if it's intact. Tidal bore is due around dawn this morning, and another every 37 hours after that, and we can try to plan a search strategy but every 37 hours it's going to end up somewhere else again..." 

She doesn't say out loud that she hadn't, actually, expected to ever find a way off this planet, unless it was by dying and waking up in some OTHER location. Her mind doesn't really know what to do with...a future that isn't that. 

"Do you have capabilities I no longer remember, that might help at all?  I have some capabilities that I might be able to compound to find and contact an entity to find the bag, but that would be expensive to even try, and the causalpathway seems... tenuous."

"It nearly goes without saying, of course, that if I had the bag, I could use the resources in it to find the bag."

It goes without– it would have gone without saying that if Merrin had the actual full resources of a standard Exception Handling remote support team behind her, and had been equipped for a "find an extremely valuable lost item" mission (not really her core skillset but she wouldn't be an insane person to send on such a mission if, like, it had to be done as soon as possible and was likely to take longer than sixteen hours of continuous work and involved dangerous aquatic work), then she would have much better chances of finding Estha's stuff. 

She does not have that. She doesn't have automated search drones, or a remote team poring over her suit camera feed, and she doesn't have remote drone footage of yesterday afternoon which is what would really have a chance of being helpful for narrowing it down. Her metal detector is short-range. Her suit does infrared camera "vision" but that's good for finding people, not bags protected by metal mesh. 

"Understood," she says. "I have no obvious brilliant ideas in the first ten seconds." Implication being that obviously one ought to try for a lot longer than ten seconds to come up with brilliant ideas, except that maybe on reflection she should say that because it will not be obvious. "We should go over the resources we both have available and see if one comes to us. My only-slightly-clever idea is to extend how long we can 'search' by recording video footage on my suit of the riverbed – I don't have an amazing electronic viewing suite but it can do basic zoom and contract enhancement and stuff. And I have underwater capability, I could swim up with the tidal current and then down the permanent river channel once the tide is out, in case it sinks in water and it's ended up down there. ...Will long-term saltwater exposure destroy it and if so how quickly? I...am not sure what the odds are on finding it with the strategies I described but they would be higher if we could spend a planetary month on it. - that's a bit under seven planetary days." 

"It should resist saltwater immersion indefinitely..."

"Your capability doesn't sound like it beats a capability to locate the object if it is anywhere within [around 1000 feet] of myself when I invoke that capability, continuing up to [12 minutes] after as I move... which I can do at around [300 feet] per [minute]... which I could potentially do, say, five times..."

"If I can succeed in communicating to my entity that I want that capability.  Or if my -- entity -- is able to infer that I need it.  There has been an anomaly in the capabilities I receive.  Or, of course, my memory of how that works has been falsified."

"And regardless, I can't get that capability -- if I can get it at all -- until either dawn, or 22.98 hours after first woke and was able to speak to you, and I'm not sure which."

"And it is possible -- it looks like, based on the other capabilities I was given, that would rely on the contents of my bag to use -- my entity thinks I can obtain the bag with the capabilities I was given, or that we have together.  Despite my not being given the capability most obviously useful for it.  Alternatively, there was a communications difficulty, or a process anomaly, or my memory about any number of possible situation facets has been falsified."

That is a lot of pieces of information that do not neatly fit into any pre-existing mental buckets and generate many additional questions, and Merrin is somewhat having difficulty catching all of them in her working memory. Really she should be taking NOTES, but it's going to continue getting colder in the shelter for the next six hours until dawn, and she doesn't...actually have any properly warm clothes...to offer Estha so that they can both get up and start working sooner. Except he did say - but this isn't the part of the day where the temperature is least survivable - 

It's feeling weirdly high-friction for Merrin to fill in all of her mental blank spots around what Estha's "capabilities" and constraints are. Maybe it's just the bizarre language thing, where Baseline is apparently missing key vocabulary? Maybe he's separately being less than fully open with her but Merrin is not going to confidently conclude that yet. 

...She very obviously needs to reassess the priorities she's had for months, and not just do the extremely tempting mental motion of deciding that she was managing before and now has strictly more resources and so everything is fine and not an a emergency.

They're almost certainly not going to die, today, and probably wouldn't even if she had an Estha to feed and shelter from the climate and he hadn't arrived with his own bonus specialabilities. But that doesn't mean nothing is time-sensitive. It sounds like Estha does, actually, think they have a chance of getting off this planet, not just eking out some minimal survival indefinitely, and it sounds like that relies on finding his missing gear, and that is time sensitive, because it's only going to keep getting harder the more tidal periods elapse.

Merrin's mind is having trouble treating this with the urgency it deserves, because it...doesn't, quite, feel real to her yet...but it seems like her brain is being silly, there. 

(She got all of that thinking rammed through her brain mostly while Estha was still talking. She's getting the hang of this "interacting with another human being without having it accidentally overwrite her ability to maintain her own internal train of thought" thing.) 

"I'm wondering if it's easiest for me to fill you in while you're using your - capability that your entity gave you," ???????, "to understand Baseline, and you have my vocabulary but not vocabulary for talking about your, um, entity? And then if you use the other capability that gives me your language, it should be easier for you to talk about the entity-related capabilities and fill me in?" 

A perfectly reasonable thought that Esta himself had not actually had yet!  It's moments like these, when Mariona manages to actually use her Cunning that is in fact exactly the numerical equal of Esta's according to Detect Thoughts, that Esta is confirmed in his sense that she may eventually someday be worth all the work that he put into her if she ever fucking grows an ambition.

Esta shows his smile, because Cultural Adaptation tells him to just fucking do that part; and then opens his mouth to deliver the sort of praise that he enjoys giving Mariona because it makes her so horribly uncomfortable --

HALT!

In this culture, you do not tell Merrin that she is special.

...because you don't compliment young people, it makes them get above their place?

Is it one of the cultures where men don't praise women?

Or because Chaotic Goods don't compliment people, if that makes them uncomfortable?  Esta is pretty sure he has seen Chaotic Goods making other people uncomfortable.

This planetary culture has a rule saying that you do not tell MERRIN SPECIFICALLY that she is special.

In much the same way that other cultures might have a rule about how to address the Queen, or which forks to eat with.

...the culture that Merrin now thinks of herself as being from, has a cultural rule specifically about how to address its equivalent of a single second-circle Worldwound fort commander??

(Well, not everyone in dath ilan knows that rule, of course, any more than everyone in a particular Golarion country knows how to address the country's dictator at a dinner party...

...but if you think about the Queen and point Cultural Adaptation to ask for the culture she's in, you're going to get the culture that includes intuiting how to address her at a banquet if she deigns to speak to you.  Not because you're getting the Queen's own mental concept of her culture -- or any other private information that she knows and the rest of the country doesn't -- but because that's the general cultural context near the Queen.)

Anyway, yes.  The part of Merrin's culture that Merrin is from -- which could be a country or a whole planet or maybe a sufficiently large city-state with its own customs and dialect, but is not just one village or fortress or such -- has a rule that MERRIN SPECIFICALLY is not to be told that she is special.

(It's known as the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, but this level of information is not going to make it through Cultural Adaptation.  Cultural Adaptation just tells you what there is a general cultural rule against doing, and if you run some internal thought experiments about it you may be able to pick up some further information about what exactly is or is not allowed.)