Esta will consider LATER what this implies, because on the face of things it does NOT PARTICULARLY MAKE SENSE.

After smiling, opening his mouth, closing his mouth, dropping the smile, and pausing somewhat awkwardly, Esta then smiles again though less broadly.  "Yes, good idea.  Though, how long was it until dawn again?  There are actions I might want to take before then, if that's less than two hours out; it's not just when the next tidal bore comes through, it's when I might or might not have my capabilities swapped and replaced."

Oh right he has no idea of her timekeeping. That's definitely one of the things Merrin needs to fill him in on, and plausibly he should...write it down in his own language so he can read it even without the capabilities his "entity" gave him active? 

"It's currently about 06:35 local time." Speaking of that, she's now waited long enough after eating a bite of bread to feel more confident it's not making her ill, and at this point it feels like it might be worth the small risk of not waiting longer to be sure if it means she has calories in her and isn't trying to think with low blood sugar. 

She points at the breads to indicate where she's going, and keeps talking as she slips out of the sleeping bag and hurries over and back with two of them. "Sunrise is due at about 13:20 local time, so that's in slightly less than seven hours. ...I don't know how your entity would define 'dawn', in dath ilan there are a few different definitions for different uses, and on this planet there's almost a three-hour gap between the point when the sky is just starting to get lighter and the point before actual sunrise when there's enough light to work by. The earliest possible definition of dawn might be as early as 09:00, in two and a half hours." 

Mmffff breaaaaaad in her faaaaaace. It's slightly difficult to eat while keeping most of her body in the sleeping bag but it's worth it. 

"That's a good example of the level of detail that my translation capability won't automatically do for me, unless I notice the problem closely enough to think about it.  The concept in my own vocabulary is precise enough that none of your words exactly fitted."

"The moment when the sun is exactly halfway above where the horizon would be if it were the bare sea.  If that's the moment when my entity comes into contact, I will need to spend an hour -- thinking at it[intonation tag: this is leaving out many important details that are hard to explain].  I will also have ten moments before then, that I can use to expend capabilities not yet expended, before their replacement.  But if I'm not -- thinking at my entity -- by the time those moments are done, I'm out of ontologicallybasic tendencies toward positiveoutcomes."

Merrin spends a second or two going ????? at an entity-granted capability for "ontologicallybasic tendencies toward positiveoutcomes" and concludes that it's going to be much easier to request an explanation later when she has his language. She is at this point pretty sure it's going to be worth the side effects, because not understanding Estha's - this version of Estha's - deal is definitely something that could kill them both via uniformed suboptimal decisions, and it doesn't look so far like whatever side effects he's experiencing from it are themselves impairing in a causing-suboptimal-decisionmaking way? And she ate the food. 

"...I think by my definitions that's just sunrise, approximately," she says. "So it sounds like should have more than six hours, and - unless you're going to need to do something many hours' walk from camp, I think that means we have time to use the rest of your current language-capability-window on me explaining to you what my resources and constraints are, and then switching?" Pause. "- Is there any reason you need to be here at sunrise to...think at your entity...other than comfort? I don't have any powered transport method, we'd be walking, and the range of places we could walk to before dawn is wider than the range of places we could walk to and also back from. ...The planet doesn't have dangerous terrestrial wildlife, that's not a threat, it's mostly just the climate." 

Unfortunate in some ways.  Circling up would be hard, and time-consuming, but not impossibly so -- if there were anything to fight worth fighting.  If there isn't, it's a lot closer to impossible.  He can't even summon poorly contained demons and kill them, because his Planar Binding is devil-only.

"The primary distance problem, I suspect, is the part where I'm on a distant planet.  I would not expect my location on this planet to make any difference at all.  Unless we moved far enough to change the time of dawn -- if my capability requests prove to be bound to dawn at all."

"- That makes sense, if your entity is at interstellar distances from here," or some other, stranger sort of distance, Merrin is getting the impression that she does not, really, understand the configuration of this larger and weirder Reality she's slipped out into, and she's not sure she should, for example, be looking at the stars in this sky and wondering which one belongs to dath ilan, "- then I wouldn't expect exact location on the planet to make any difference. I was mostly wondering if you might want to go search for your bag, I do have night-searchlight capabilities. ...I think probably I should focus on filling you in for the next - you've had your spell up for 32 minutes, I'll set an alarm for, uh, 73 minutes to warn us when it's 15 minutes short of running out, does that make sense...?" 

"It does.  I could use a timepiece myself, if you have one going spare; I had put mine into my Holding Bag before the tidal bore struck, to avoid its loss."

"--I had not been able to understand at the time what you were warning me about, other than that it was water and flooding.  That was a less powerful translation capability and I was impaired in other ways by my recent encounter, but it is still a lesson to us both on the dangers of capability-automated translation."

"I intend to now share with you a language; I have on reflection picked a conlang I know, that is closer to the language we are currently speaking, but should still contain words for all of the missing concepts.  Unless something further goes wrong, or my memories are wrong.  I think it wiser to begin experimenting with that language while I am still capable of speaking Baseline, should there be something sayable in one language but not the other.  It is not a human conlang; it is spoken by a particular utilityfunction of entity.  I conjecture this to be actually less dangerous."

....O...kay? Merrin feels like if she were SMARTER she would perhaps be able to think of the correct questions, on the spot, rather than just having a lot of ?????? about having a conlang spoken by a "particular utilityfunction of entity" (???) implanted in her brain via some kind of mentalistmagic (???? ).

Laeirthe help should she go for it. 

(Mental shove) move over she's not really leaving him any space in this brain to have thoughts - what was the question again -? 

...She could certainly stand to be somewhat paranoid about the possible ways this could go terribly, but - low confidence, Laeirthe is having to squeeze his thoughts down to a very narrow un-nuanced heuristic-opinion right now - he suspects that even after applying suspicion, the information value would be worth the risk? And - there's a thing here where if "Estha" is operating adversarially, and has entity-granted mentalistmagic, he would not, actually, need Merrin's cooperation to harm them with it, and it's only in some subset of the worlds where Estha is an enemy that Merrin agreeing to receive his conlang will make things go worse than if she refuses? 

Also it's incredibly frustrating for him, too, not understanding the details of Estha's capabilities, and it seems reasonable that having both of them speaking both languages for an interval will resolve their confusions more quickly. 

"That makes sense to me," Merrin says, after appearing to go quiet and think while making a slightly odd expression for about twenty seconds. 

That's not an exact body language pattern he remembers seeing off Mariona; but not knowing what this means, or how to relate it to everything else about Merrin that is different, Esta will set it aside.

"This is a capability-effect you could resist with perhaps one chance in two, if you tried to resist it, so try to avoid resisting.  Or as one would say in [Utopian], and as you will shortly understand:  [Fail your Will save.]  Ready?"

...That's interesting. Laeirthe is paying attention now. 

Not in a way where he's going to resist it and then it won't work, right? Right? 

That is probably not how anything works. Given how Laeirthe is an emulation of a fictional character running on Merrin's brain and is, like, at most 10% of a person. But, sure, he will endeavor not to get in the way. 

"Ready," Merrin says, and - for lack of any better internal prompt for 'not resisting' something that might otherwise prompt resistance - tries to do the relaxing-into-whatever-happens mental motion that she might do if, for example, Estha were about to cause her an amusing amount of pain. 

Share Language (Utopian).

It's only in the process of actually untying the spell that Esta realizes/remembers -- he has not cast this spell literally since his days as a 2nd-circle -- that Esta could now in principle use it to grant more than one language; indeed, he could use it to grant three.

In that split second, Esta decides --

-- to grant Merrin only Utopian, because that was his original plan and Esta does not have any time to think about it.

Oh wow, is this Merrin's first Will save ever?  What an occasion!

Roll a DC 10 Will check in order to resist resisting and successfully fail, please!

...

And let's say that, uhhh...

Uhhh...

Merrin is a very skilled and famous Exception Handler, who has practiced under many arduous conditions and also never actually encountered any sort of Will-impinging magic in her whole life!  Which grants her a base Will bonus of +3.  And of course she has a WIS bonus of +4; Creation at least understands that part very well.

So, basically don't roll a 1 or 2?

Merrin can apparently figure that out on the fly! The spell lands. 

...It doesn't "feel like anything" in the sense that there's no sensory input, not like being physically bapped with something or injected with a drug or seeing a bright light or - she's not sure why she's trying to compare it to all of those things, or why she even expected to be able to sense it happening directly - 

No, that was a Laeirthe-expectation, because his fictional character instance can perceive magic happening to him! Unsurprisingly, because this is now how anything works, he did not port that ability over to Merrin's brain just as a result of her simulating him. 

Okay, so she can't directly perceive magic and that bothers her imaginary character-model. 

Does she speak another language now, though??? 

For some reason the internal test that Merrin's brain instantly tries to run, on this matter, is not "how would she ask Estha about his entity in his conlang that she should now speak" or even the also-sensible "how would she translate her planned explanation of the shelter specs", but the very stupid "imagine she's giving a standard shift report on a patient to Estha, for some reason" and, for mental-availability reasons, the actual historical patient her brain offers for that use is Kalorm, at the end of the first day. 

So how would Merrin translate a detailed ICU shift report on a patient who she'd pulled out of the middle of an ocean in cardiac arrest and needed to treat in a MOVING HELICOPTER for a REALLY LONG TIME and who had not given his advanceconsent for cryopreservation, into this conlang? 

Okay, see, the way this version of the spell works, unlike Tongues or even Comprehend Languages, you only get words of Utopian that Esta knows.

Does real Utopian have all of those words?  Yes.  Absolutely.  There's almost no reason for anyone to worry about blood glucose, unless they're part of a small strange Axis neighborhood full of LARPing medical fetishists who like reenacting famous medical emergencies that include humanoids, as if they had to be treated entirely using advanced but nonmagical technology.  But Axis has those.  Its people are so intelligent, long-lived, rich, numerous, good at solving multiparty coordination problems, and bent on entertaining themselves, that their degree of weird-subcultural fractal differentiation makes dath ilan look like Montana.

Does Esta know those words?  He does not.

Blood glucose is gonna come out as "blood sugar".  There's no word for sodium or potassium levels.  There's no word for helicopter.  Etc etc.

Merrin's memory may, if she troubles to consult its very short-term window, now realize what it means to [fail your Will save], and that [saves] are a thing, and that [Will] is only one flavor of it.

Merrin realizes within about three seconds that this is, indeed, a stupid test for "did it work", and will think to consult her auditory memory loop and...huh...Laeirthe does that make sense as a conceptualmagic concept? 

Again, Laeirthe is going to reiterate that he does not know information Merrin doesn't know because he is, literally, made out of her brain. ...But sure, it makes sense for mentalistmagic to be something one could mentally resist, and to be difficult-to-resist on varying dimensions? 

(Laeirthe is, perhaps, slightly freaking out at the part where they just had MIND ALTERING MAGIC DONE TO THEIR BRAIN and this is - actually a big deal? This is a really really really important update for Merrin about what sorts of thing Reality includes?? Is Merrin even paying attention here -)