This is a really exhausting kind of thinking to have to be doing constantly in every conversation and Merrin is...really not sure how long she can keep doing it. 

...Out of curiosity, what vocabulary in the new language comes to mind when she considers talking about mentalistmagic mind control effects that might affect her ability to stick to a commitment she made prior? 

Oh those are [enchantment (compulsion)s], a kind of [enchantment]!

If hypothetically they were built into a [magic item] that would make it [cursed], but she can't get off just the sense of language whether it'd be easy to [curse] a [Belt] with an [oath]-breaking [enchantment (compulsion)] specifically.

[Oaths] are very strongly tied to something called [Lawfulness], by the way; a word with a sense of depth about it like an ocean opening up under your feet.

Oooooh, shiny– also, now is not the time to poke new language concepts. 

...It doesn't obviously seem like the [cursed] concept would apply in a way where Estha is directing it, as opposed to being a fact about the [belt] that would hit him too? Like, Merrin is not incredibly confident of that, obviously, one should not be confident of any conclusions drawn from linguistic analysis of a language implanted in one's mind via poorly understood mentalistmagic, but - if she wasn't generally in a paranoid mood, she doesn't think she would worry about it at all? 

Ugh. 

"I'm comfortable swearing that I currently intend to return the [belt] after a minute, have in the past been consistently able to keep to commitments of that nature even when it was tempting not to, and have no specific reason to expect that to be different here," she says. "...If you'd rather not lend it to me unless I swear more categorically than that, I think that's fine, I'm inclined to believe you about the stamina-increasing effect." Since she's already seen some other evidence of this Estha having a lot more physical stamina and resilience than hers. 

Utopian is sufficiently fine-grained to distinguish 'intends to return' as a committed plan versus uncommitted plan versus self-prediction versus mere report of an intention.  Esta would not have accepted that assurance in Taldane, but he will accept it in Utopian.  And to do this thing with a less strong oath, is making a show of trusting her more, while not very much increasing the real risks.  It would be a strange moment for betrayal.

(Even Asmodeans will ask for time to think before swearing oaths, or demur from swearing them too strongly.  Hell itself does not prefer for Evil souls to lose their Law.  It does not strike Esta as strange.)

Esta undoes his Belt, suppressing all visible flinches without even thinking about whether or not he should (his dath ilan Cultural Adaptation has run out by now).  He hands the Belt over to Merrin.

(Merrin suppresses her own hesitation-flinch temptation equally instinctively, though for different reasons; it’s not a matter of his social perception of her, it’s more like the thing where, you know, sometimes in an Exception Handling training she needs to jump out of a helicopter, with precise timing, and flinching would mess it up, and so once Merrin has made the decision to do something, in the absence of something analogous to “looking out the open hatch of said helicopter to realize they’re over land rather than water”, her decision is made and she does not in the moment of execution try to question her past self’s judgement on it.)

She puts the belt on.

…Wow.

Merrin suspects she can’t actually feel the full effect without making use of it in a situation that would actually strain her usual stamina, but she can feel something. It feels like…

…there’s a thing where sometimes she’s pushing through a bit of resistance to do things, digging into reserves that her body wants to make sure she remembers are not free. She’s analogized it in her head to starting a second vasopressor on a patient - you can do that! It’s not that doomy! But you wouldn’t do it casually just to counteract the side effects of a pain medication you’d given them equally casually; you’d want to stop and ask if it was really the right call to dig further into your backup reserves of blood-pressure-increasing-capacity, and she treats pushing through fatigue the same way.

Since arriving on this planet, she’s been doing that almost all the time. There’s at no point been a period when she had enough slack to eat and sleep as much as she needed to feel fully, 100% rested and recovered.

When she’s rested, there’s no mental resistance to physical exertion; if anything it’s actively appealing to climb random objects in her environment for no reason except because they’re there and she can and it’s satisfying to use her muscles.

Merrin could SUPER go for climbing a random tree right now, and she hasn’t felt that way since before her plane crashed.

…After exactly sixty seconds she takes the belt off and gives it back. It’s not actually that hard. She doesn’t need to be bursting with physical energy to handle whatever their plan ends up being, and it seems plausible that Estha does need the [belt] boost more than she does.

He puts it on.

"Does it now seem to you like it would not have been an anomaly that I was able to work alongside you for a full day, if I had then had a Belt of Constitution?  Think carefully, for it is a matter of some importance to both of us which of our memories are or plausibly could be real."

Esta does not command, 'And answer me correctly rather than telling me what you think I want to hear.'  Even though the cultural adaptation has run out, Esta does remember all the times that dath ilan culture sharply informed him to leave out additions like this from previous questions, on the grounds that they would sound incredibly strange.  Apparently in their context Merrin would default to truth anyways for some unknown reason, which she would also expect Estha to know about.

Merrin's immediate thought was that she's definitely much less confused now! 

...She will, however, diligently try to think about it carefully anyway. 

"It's - less - of an anomaly?" she says. "Assuming that in your memories, you have the [belt] and I don't. ...There are cumulative effects from training, right - my endurance isn't just an innate trait, the training matters, but it's a specialization that made sense for me because I have innate aptitude and I enjoy it. Based on my memories, most people weren't interested in training for the kind of work I do, because the training wasn't enjoyable for them - and they wouldn't get as far anyway, plenty of people will do work they don't enjoy that much if their aptitude is such that they can make a lot of money for it - but if neither is true, it would make more sense for them to specialize in the areas where they did have higher innate aptitude, just like how I didn't specialize in math because I'm not very good at it and it's not fun to practice. But I can see how having a [belt] to increase [Constitution] could change the tradeoffs there quite a lot, such that in your memories, it made sense for both of us to specialize in the same kind of work." 

Merrin can translate all of those familiar Baseline concepts into the conlang, more or less, but the timer informed her that Estha's translation-effect will have worn off, and she's failing to find the term for a 'standard deviation' in the conlang vocabulary. She just won't bother to speculate aloud about how many standard deviations out from the median she was for dath ilan and how that might compare to the effectsize of the [belt], she decides, it's probably not the most important part.

(One thing notably missing from Merrin's musing is any acknowledgement of the concept that someone might end up doing a career for reasons other than personal choice.) 

(In his memories, they are both "specialized" on a Wisdom-related occupation, though of course they are also both Cunning enough that they certainly could have been wizards had they so deigned.  If Esta was getting the spells he asked for, he'd ask for Detect Anxieties and see if she's still WIS 18.

The entire thing with her supposedly having very low abilityscores, at the same as rising to the top of an elite profession, is not something that Esta immediately understands.  Is it -- so that nobody ever demands more of her, at the same time that she excels?  Esta has never dreamed of having a lower stat in anything, ever.  It certainly doesn't look from the outside like her mental stats have lowered.

Would it have something to do with the Dark Tapestry inversion that made her pseudo-Chaotic-Good?  --Actually Esta is only now remembering for the first time in a while that this was even supposed to be true.  Her attitude toward making an oath was certainly Lawful.  An inverted Mariona should enjoy being praised.  Possibly that entire theory is wrong and gets superseded by the dreamworld theory.  But then if Mariona didn't have her desires inverted, why does she fondly remember an 'amusing amount of pain', and what was their relationship like in her memory--

Esta will worry about this later.  They have a Bag to retrieve.  His multiple incense-using spells suggest it can be done this cycle.  And if Asmodeus troubled Himself to indicate that, it maybe means they SHOULD go find the Bag, before it gets any more lost, or destroyed.)

"I think we should resume that topic later and at greater leisure, which leisure we do not know possess."

"I have been musing upon how to use the tidal bore for transportation.  For now, my ideas all require spells I was not granted this cycle, which may indicate they are wrong.  I will speak them out loud in case you have [technological] substitutes, or simply other [Cunning] ideas."

"[Water Breathing] does what it sounds like and would last me the [day].  The spell [Stoneskin], could I be granted it, would do to protect me from simple impacts for 2 [hours].  It requires roughly [1.7 grams] of [diamond dust], and that I do not have even in my [Bag], unless you happen to have it on hand."

(Esta knew of [diamond], and his Shared Utopian says, that [diamond] was an extremely hard transparent crystal, superlatively rare and valuable.)

"Possibly with the combination of [Control Water] and [Air Walk] I could manage to ride the tidal bore.  I suspect [Word of Recall] will not take me back to [civilization], both because I suspect us to be on a different [Material plane], and also because I have never been told that it crosses interstellar distances.  But that spell might well do to extract me from the tidal bore in moments, should that clever plan fail; and otherwise, return us both to this base, at the project's end."

"[Detect Magic] might serve to substitute for [Locate Object], if I move my head about quickly and keep observing forward, and if little else here is magical."

"And now that I think on it... I could not grant you [Locate Object] this way, but with [Imbue With Spell Ability] I could grant you [Detect Magic]."

"Or maybe -- simplest of all, and with no other spells required -- I could wear your [armor], be carried along by the tidal bore, and use [Detect Magic] myself.  Yes!  Perhaps that is the intended solution..."  Except for the part where Merrin's armor is a Dark Tapestry artifact so strange that Detect Magic can't even see it.  "Assuming your [armor] has no noteworthy costs or side effects upon those who use it; nor requires their species to be exactly of your own kind, as might no longer be the case if one of us has changed."

(Magical armor is nearly always self-resizing, so far as Esta knows, nor does it typically require an education to use.)

Extremely hard transparent crystals - well, in this case Merrin isn't sure it's something that even exists in dath ilan for her to recognize, but she does have some ideas of what those could be. Though she doesn't have 1.7 grams of any of the potential options lying around; her handheld drill that she's been using to stick climbing pitons into the walls of her cave is technically diamond-tipped, diamond being one of the first things coming to mind as 'crystal' + 'extremely 'hard', but that's "cheap industrial-grade diamond particles embedded in metal", she has no idea how to get it out of the metal and doesn't particularly want to destroy her very useful drill in the attempt, and it's only a fraction of a gram anyway. 

She then has to spend a moment boggling at Esta's idea to even figure out what he could possibly be confused about to suggest it. 

"...Lending you my armor isn't workable," she says after a moment. "It's custom-fitted to me." And also it took months of training before she could use it safely in conditions like the tidal bore, and a lot of the functions require being familiar with dath ilani computing tech and certainly being able to read Baseline, but the fact that it's sized to fit her and will absolutely not fit Estha instead is enough of a hard blocker by itself. 

As for the rest... "I don't see why anything on this planet other than what you arrived with would be magical, so that should be identifying. ....Depending on how far you can see with it and on whether it gets through water if you're not in the water, you might be able to walk back along the side of the river channel as the tide is dropping, and if you see it then I can do the swimming part to retrieve it. I think I can put together an air supply for you that supports underwater use, and flotation, and that might make it workable at all to ride the tidal current upstream, if you have a way to evacuate if it goes badly – the big wave happens fairly early in the incoming tide period, and it's the most powerful push upstream but there are a few smaller ones later and the current will be working for rather than against us until the tide turns and starts going out again." 

(He notes the convenient claim that her armor only works for herself, despite the obvious long-term cost-inefficiency of an armor like that, but the time to test or challenge this is not now.)

"I don't have [Word of Recall].  But I suppose if there is some version of this plan that only requires that one spell, I could simply try it without that, and hope that my [deity] indeed foresaw and intended that the plan would just work... is this a thing you could arrange before sunrise, or maybe, arrange before [23 hours] pass since I completed my [prayers] and spoke to you?"

See, this is why Merrin would be handling this better if she could TAKE NOTES and separately record the [spells] he says he has, already, versus could hypothetically have if he can request them from his [god].

She's just...repeatedly failing to successfully take actions about that, such as getting out of the sleeping bag where she is cuddling the man who is almost certainly not her Estha from dath ilan and who she's trying to be be suspicious and paranoid about, but who she apparently still really wants to be cuddling because she is JUST THAT TOUCH-STARVED.

"I might be able to make that equipment by dawn but I would be rushing. I can almost certainly do it before 23 hours pass since you completed your last [prayers]." 

"Hm."

"There's then an entire different branch of possibilities, surrounding spells I've been given that [conjure (calling)] an [outsider] that I can request by species or by name, if I know it.  I have specifically [Planar Inquiry], and a more powerful form, [Planar Binding], but not much in the way of [offerings] to pay either.  I could, I suppose, sacrifice a [Ring] to the [Planar Inquiry], which would be a ludicrous overpayment; and hope that the [outsider] who answers the [Planar Binding] will accept as a cause to do its work that my [deity] [godchose] that spell."

"There is probably a species of [outsider] that could locate my [Bag].  I do not know which one.  I could try asking that in the [Planar Inquiry], before proceeding to the [Planar Binding]..."

"Do you have anything valuable but that you do not need and cannot use?  I am -- not quite sure what the rules are, about that, but we could try..."

"I suppose another question I should ask is if you randomly happen to have a large amount of expensive [incense], in which case my 4th-circle [Divination]* spell might well simply tell me my bag's location."

(*)  A Utopian speech-marker indicates this thing's proper name unfortunately sounds the same as something else's general category.  A further rule of Axis states that any such word in a contract is automatically presumed to refer to its most common and general interpretation, unless this marker appears and further identifying info is then given.  This marker is even more necessary because no more than dath ilan would Axis ever in an eon form such a practice as capital versus lowercase letters; and hence, doesn't distinguish proper nouns by their capitalization.

The odd thing here is that [incense], when Merrin introspects on the word-connotations, includes "natural substance that burns" and "smells nice while burning" and then "burned deliberately for that reason", as well as the part where it's a [spell] [material component]. 

Baseline does not have a specific term for a substance one burns on purpose because it smells nice, because in dath ilan you don't...do...that. However, Merrin has totally been doing that! Because she's been really bored and short on sensory pleasures and this planet has rather little to offer in the way of tasty food (that she can eat more than a small number of grams per day of without regretting it terribly) but it sure does have a wide array of plant and animal substances that smell pleasant and interesting when burned, and Merrin initially worried a lot more about exposing her lungs to weird toxins but after a while of not noticing any immediate symptoms, she started to care less about the probability that it would give her lung cancer in ten years. Since she did not expect to survive ten years either way. 

"...I have local substances that might be like [incense]?" she says. "I - have no idea if they count as expensive. They were very labor-intensive, and I guess in dath ilan my time was pretty valuable, but here they don't have a market value because I was the only person on this planet until you arrived, and I think even if you had money to buy them from me for a large amount, that's still not the same as them having a market value which counts as very expensive?" 

"I have no idea what the rules are to that level of detail."

"I propose... to buy your incense from you for the monetary amount demanded by the spell, payable from my [account] back in civilization by true and enforceable contract... and hope that's how it works..."

"It might, possibly, work better if you calculated the cost of your labor, an ordinary merchant's markup, and the corresponding price of the incense, and charged me that?"

Mrrrrggg this is exactly the kind of thing where:  

- Merrin really hates having to interact in too much detail with her time being worth money. 

- Merrin always feel really embarrassed about hating it because, like, this is an extremely basic skill? And yet plenty of literal six-year-olds are better at it than her? 

- Her Estha knows that she hates it would absolutely be teasing her about that right now and so it's kind of weird and uncanny that other-Estha is not doing that. 

Buuuut she's a grown adult and she can handle the existence of money and the fact that it's completely normal to exchange it for goods and services. 

"Okay. I think in that case I need some way of doing currency conversion between the monetary units I know from dath ilan and what your world would use..." 

The economics of Merrin's dreamworld make absolutely no fucking sense.  Hopefully at some future point Esta will have enough other bonuses to stack with that one that he can snap Mariona out of her dream.

Esta has been trying not to give away that his memories are of a completely different world, he was trying to maintain in Merrin's mind the possibility that they were from a secret department of {dath ilan}'s government; but he does not think he really got through the economics conversation while maintaining that possibility as plausible in her mind.

Trying to anchor on the price of bread, for example, was apparently a mistake.  He didn't ask outright what peasants eat in Dark Tapestry dreamworlds if it is not bread.  But it is, evidently, not bread.  In retrospect that should have been a conversation to have with Cultural Adaptation running.

...And finally, Esta is ready to buy 25gp of incense from Merrin, to try on an Augury, as a test; before he buys another 25gp of incense, on which to try his Divination, which would be the actually key spell that might tell them roughly how far along the sea-channel to walk, to find Esta's bag.

Actually doing all that would require them finalizing a plan they could do the Augury about.  Or for that matter, physically carrying out the purchase and exchange would require them both getting out of the sleeping roll.  At what point exactly are they ready to start the day?

...It's almost 09:00 and it's still really cold in the shelter and won't even start getting warmer at all for at least another four hours, but yeah they should get up at this point. 

Merrin will just put her fully-charged suit on and do things while wearing it. (She did not break even on battery power yesterday, which feels mildly oof just on habit, but she still has plenty banked, her suit is fully charged and the main battery has over 1000 Wh left and should fill up some more over the sunlit hours.)

Can Estha make do if he fixes his armor? It seems wasteful to start the clock on either [Endure Elements] or [Planetary Adaptation] now, given that this is not even the dangerous-extremes part of the day, but she doesn't really have warm clothes to lend him, distinct from emergency blankets that are a bit awkward to wear while moving around. 

(Merrin is...not sure what she believes about this Estha and his life history. It's mostly quicksand in her head. He clearly is Estha, somehow, and it's equally clear that they have different intuitions about how Reality works on a very basic level and she has trouble imagining what cognitohazardous mind control process could take the dath ilan out of someone that thoroughly. Which doesn't mean it's impossible, of course, just that - whatever, she doesn't understand the metaphysics of this entire stupid ridiculous situation and she probably isn't ever going to, those are big questions for someone smarter than her. For now, Merrin is just increasingly finding that it doesn't feel like it helps at all to make predictions on the basis that this is Estha-from-dath-ilan-with-brain-damage.

She also doesn't really feel like it helps either to imagine him as maybe being a shapeshifting alien trying to imitate her memories of Estha, or an immortal spirit with access to bits and pieces of the real Estha's memories. Those both feel like they would produce, like, more similar memories and less...intrinsic himness? And there's a lot of Estha-ness!

Shrug. Merrin does not understand these things. Maybe at some eventual point she'll have time to think uninterrupted and Laeirthe can make something out of it that she can't see on her own.) 

Esta will consider it worthwhile in the long run to repair his undersuit as well as his armor, by thread and needle if he cannot obtain another Make Whole to repair the minor magical aspects of his clothing as well.

Meanwhile, he will repair his armor -- with Greater Make Whole it is but a single [moment], should Merrin wish to watch that, and learn again that magic is real -- and wear it over his bare flesh, to abrade it some little bit, and tolerate the cold by willpower.  (If he dared think that this little discomfort should count as suffering, any of his superiors in Cheliax would be happy to show him what actual suffering was, should they hear of the thought.  Nobody has done this to Esta in some years, but that is because he is past having punishment-earning thoughts like that.)

The two of them do have the option of starting the clock now on Endure Elements and Planetary Adaptation, and hoping that Esta gets those spells again on his next [day], along with Share Language and Tongues and other such needfuls (Esta does not mention Cultural Adaptation).  Esta would in any case cast those spells come sunrise, or come nine hours after dawn, if his [god] reached back again; and would then refresh them later in the [day], and then get more spells on the next cycle, and ideally so on indefinitely.  If everything works the way it should; which is why Esta was checking their ability to survive the heat, if he doesn't get more spells this planetary day.

(Merrin is actually kind of considering it her job to fix Estha's other clothing that, after all, she was the one who cut up, if it's not doable instantly with magic; she has a sewing kit and she's even had a lot of recent practice.) 

If Esta avoids visibly showing any sign of discomfort, Merrin isn't going to be worried about him! Her power armor is comfortable - and in fact not actually meant to be worn with a lot of clothing underneath - and keeps her warm, so why wouldn't LITERALLY MAGIC armor do at least as well as that? She definitely doesn't need [Endure Elements] yet -  so if they want to stay in sync on that, and he's comfortable enough for now, it probably makes sense to wait?

...She'll go get out the box where she keeps her effortfully extracted sample of things-that-burn-and-smell-nice (also a project, woven out of seaweed, Merrin miiiight have had too much time on her hands for the last while). The form factors are a mix of "stiff wax", "gelatinous stuff", "oil", "weirdly flammable papery leaf bits", and "plant bits in oil." She's mostly been keeping them in repurposed medical containers, though a few of the firm wax blocks are instead wrapped in more wax-paper-seaweed; it turns out you can free up a lot of containers if you dubiously combine a bunch of oral drugs into the same container and trust yourself to visually distinguish them. 

...Merrin has no idea what form factor the [incense] needs to be in to use it for the [spell]? But this is the selection she's got, along with her estimates of the cost in "GP" per gram of each kind.