...maybe Esta wasn't doing it wrong.  Maybe Asmodeus is just that far away.

Esta lets go of his contempt, for it was tiring him, and goes to sleep.

Merrin went to sleep over an hour before Esta. She was tired, but just one long exhausting 24-hour shift was not, actually, enough to return her from her post-Heal fitness to her previous levels of exhaustion.

She went to sleep with some unresolved anxiety, which is a great way to put her brain in a state where it's convinced she's in an ongoing-emergency training scenario and should wake at the slightest unexpected interruption. She's out of the habit of having anyone else in her space at all, let alone sharing her sleeping bag, and so that by itself is more likely to count as such an interruption. 

These are some of the reasons that Merrin wakes after less than seven hours asleep, well before Esta, and finds herself not immediately inclined to go back to sleep. 

Uninterrupted thinking time! That's a critical resource right now! 

But she doesn't waaaaaaaaaaanna 

...Merrin does, actually, have enough of a trained mental habit on her own to catch the combination of "knowingly having put off some post-event processing due to it not being a good time" with "finding herself not wanting to think about it after all", and flag that as something to pay attention to. 

There are quite a lot of possible reasons why she might not want to think about her situation. But what specific reasons feel like they're most in the way, right now? 

...Well, there sure is the component of it where it's a possibility that her memories have been comprehensively altered and dath ilan Civilization doesn't even exist, or something. 

It does seem to her like the most straightforward version of Estha's hypothesis - of the part of it she knows, he's holding back information - is left with less probability mass after the observation that his Heal spell did not reset her.

Not ruled out, because Merrin does not understanding anything here well enough to be ruling out hypotheses yet, but...an update against. 

- and there's definitely a thing going on where the thought that maybe all of her memories are a fake construct and she's really just the damaged remnant of some completely different person, is one that leads to "and then there's no point trying to have accurate beliefs at all", and then there's a burst of mental pain, and - if her brain is punishing her for having a thought, which is what that amounts to, then it's not actually surprising at all for this to backpropagate into an aversion to start trying to think on purpose in the first place. 

....Is there, in fact, anything of value to Merrin and Merrin's decisions, in shutting down all attempts to reason about whether her memories can be trusted because, if they can't be, neither can her thoughts? 

It's - not obvious to Laeirthe that there is? 

Laeirthe is not talking about the actually cognitohazardous entity that Estha claims was involved. Merrin knows almost nothing about that part anyway! He's talking about the broader question, of jugging Estha's hypothesis against others, and tracking updates to how likely it seems that dath ilan ""doesn't really exist"" or that all of her extensive knowledge of biology and medicine are completely made up. 

Whatever happened to her before she "woke up" on this planet, whether or not it involved contact with the cognitohazardous entity that Estha claims to have ecountered, Laeirthe does not think it's obvious that it's additionally cognitohazardous to Merrin to form the thought, now, that her memories might be fake and also might not be fake?

 She should lower her confidence in all of her reasoning, and accordingly put less weight on her own judgement when it comes to large, high stakes decisions with significant effects on the Future - for example, she should probably not make a decision to, say, destroy any planets or something on the basis of what she's learning lately - buuut that is not currently a decision she's faced with, and also Laeirthe does not actually get the impression that Merrin is the sort of person who needs to be talked down from making huge sweeping decisions off a very new worldmodel-update. 

What, no, Merrin is absolutely not going to be making any decisions to DESTROY A PLANET on her own judgement based on whatever she learns in the upcoming days or months!!! Honestly Merrin cannot imagine circumstances under which she would consider herself even slightly qualified to make that kind of decision even without the concern about memory alteration or dath ilan not being real!

Thaaaaat is perhaps the other direction of error. Merrin is no longer in a situation where she can hand off particularly difficult and high-stakes decisions to a team of dath ilan's best and brightest and their prediction markets. If Merrin declares an entire swath of types-of-decision off limits because she, what, isn't smart enough or isn't qualified or something, then the alternative is prooobably not going to be a more qualified person stepping in. In many to most of the possible Realities compatible with observations so far, that they might be in, Merrin is now the sole representative of dath ilan's Civilization. She doesn't get to call in her boss. 

....It's not actually relevant right now, though, because it's still mostly the case that the person affected by Merrin's decisions is Merrin herself.

There's also Estha, but...

...huh. Merrin is noting a certain - not exactly reluctance, but definitely confusion and conflictedness - in feeling responsible for Estha's survival and future. 

She...wants it to be the case that she can just trust him to handle being responsible for his own situation? Really, she desperately wanted it to be the case that he could be trustworthy for both of them, that she could in fact report to someone else other than herself as the most qualified representative of dath ilan's Civilization. 

She doesn't get to have that, but she doesn't...really feel like she has the emotional slack, or something, to fully take responsible for "making sure that Estha is okay."

Even though this is actually very important to her! And she continues to feel like she's picking up some uncanny background vibe of non-okayness, and she has no idea what to do with it, she doesn't feel like she can– oh, that is part of it, that this altered!Estha or other!Estha is in fact literally in a position of authority relative to other!Merrin (or, maybe, original!Merrin, if dath ilan is the half of this strange collision that isn't ""real"".) 

And...right, it makes sense that it would feel painful and dizzying and like too much weight to lift, if she doesn't really expect Estha to listen to her even if she comes to a more confident conclusion about their situation, one that disagrees with his assessment? 

...That seems like an important thing to notice. 

Merrin is not sure what to do with that observation, right now, other than add it to her own self-model of her current emotional state. 

Which does seem important to be tracking, because she's...kind of not entirely okay right now, isn't she. 

...Is she, currently, not-okay in a way where it seems like she's concealing important tactical information from Estha by not bringing it up? 

Merrin...isn't sure. 

A bunch of the problem is that she currently does not really understand how he's modeling her. She kind of has the sense that there are more important differences than just autobiographical memories and career experience between the Merrin she is right now and the person Estha remembers. She doesn't have a handle on what they are, because Estha had some sort of confusing justification - that she thinks she failed to parse fully even at the time and has now half-forgotten - for not trying to fill her in just yet. 

So: Estha probably thinks that she's some-variant-of-insane? 

It's not obvious to her that this comes along with understanding the psychological effects on her of months of isolation, followed by a stressful rescue mission with personal emotional stakes, followed immediately by an extremely confusing situation filled with social deception and ambiguous cognitohazards.

Merrin...is not at her best. She thinks she's coping? But this might go on for months, if Estha's bizarre theory is true, or if– there are things she's not thinking about - 

- she's been so desperately touch-starved for months and hungers for cuddles even though she's - abruptly realizing that she's not actually sure if other!Estha and other!Merrin are even dating, aaaaaaa, that had NOT OCCURRED TO HER until now and she suddenly feels like maybe she has been making everything REALLY WEIRD– 

Focus. 

- stop. No, not that. Go back. Laeirthe saw a thought go past out of the metaphorical corner of his eye and he'd like Merrin to rewind her internal monologu so he can stare at it, please. 

....What is she not thinking about? 

...Huh. Despite all of the metacognitive skills that dath ilan was able to eventually hammer into her, Merrin doesn't actually think she was on track to catch that particular avoidance-leap in her own thoughts without Laeirthe running as a second thread. 

It's....the narrative tropes thing. Ugh. 

It seems like perhaps Merrin needs to actually give some dedicated thought to the cluster of hypotheses that involve their situation, in some way - she doesn't need an explained mechanism to check for matching predictions - following narrative tropes recognizable from dath ilan fiction.

She's allowed to do that and note down her conclusions and continue not to make any decisions based on narrative-tropes logic! But Laeirthe is going to advocate here for doing the reasoning, and seeing where she ends up, even if she's not inclined to trust this type of model enough to make decisions based on it. Though it's not like she has an enormous amount of trust in any of her situation-models right now. 

Mrrg. Okay. 

Merrin...did feel, before Estha showed up, like she "recognized the genre" of the world she was experiencing. Solo isekai survival-in-a-hostile-environment. 

Whatever this is, is...a different genre. What the flaming nuclear waste is the genre, though. There's Merrin. There's her exoplanet, that she had time to get established on. There's a version of her boyfriend who isn't quite how she remembers him, and he, too, remembers a version of her that doesn't quite match... 

....Is it. Is it a superheated fanfiction alternate-universe crossover plot. 

That's so silly!!!! If Reality actually works in a way that's even vaguely slightly analogous to the thought she just had, then Merrin would like to return it and get a different Reality that is trying literally at all not to be completely ridiculous!!!

....Okay, but what are the most common narrative tropes in the genre she just identified? 

Look. Laeirthe is not disagreeing that it's absurd and silly. But Merrin could perhaps stand to register some advancepredictions of what plot beats would come next, if this were a "fanfiction alternate-universe crossover" plot following any recognizable dath ilani tropes, and then they will see if any of those things happen? 

Mrrrggg. 

...Merrin mostly doesn't even read that genre! She can mostly just name it as a recognizable format for a plot premise. Specifically, this looks like a third-setting alternative universe crossover plot. You would start with a story in a particular setting - possibly one meant to be set in dath ilan, or possibly a secondary world, with or without alternatephysics, etc - with a particular cast of characters, and someone (possibly the same author, possibly a different one) liked the characters enough to make an entirely new set of them with backstories rewritten to fit a completely different setting. And then you might have the author or authors, or yet another author, decide it would be interesting to see what the two versions of the cast of characters would do if they met each other directly. 

She's seen - not necessarily finished reading, it's really not her favorite genre and honestly Merrin has been too busy to read much fiction for a long time - but she's glanced at versions where a protagonist, or whole set of characters, from dath ilan encounter an alternatephysics world with alternate-universe versions of people they know.

Sometimes - she thinks less often? - it's a character or set of characters  from a secondary world encountering dath ilan, including versions of themselves.

And then, she's seen versions where the protagonist and supporting cast in-their-context just...have a lot of resources to throw at a problem, and would resolve the plot unsatisfyingly quickly relative to what the author wants to write, and that's where she's also seen the third-setting version – take both sets of characters out of their native context, separate them from the resources and allies that would let them solve the entire plot in ten in-story minutes, and contrive enough in-story time for the author to write whatever entertaining character interactions they felt like. 

It's...sort of an unserious subgenre, she thinks, a lot of the time? Well, either that or it immediately turns into a tower of meta wherre the characters within the story are reasoning about how they're within a story, and Merrin finds that trope kind of exhausting and tedious. (In fact, she sure finds it kind of exhausting and tedious to be enacting it literally right now.) But the easiest way to get around that is to just - claim by authorial fiat that the characters are not thinking along those lines - and implicitly make the claim that it's a silly story not meant to be taken seriously as an example of reasoning. 

Iiiiiiinteresting. 

So what exact examples of "entertaining character interactions" might come up in a story with a premise contrived to force the characters into doing that rather than solving the entire plot in ten in-world minutes?

...On further consideration, maybe it's not always that the characters would simply solve the plot immediately, that the author is trying to contrive their way around? Sometimes it's that the characters in their contexts have extremely difficult problems, and the author - imagine this! - didn't actually want to write half a million words of worldoptimization, and so contrived to separate the characters from their difficult problems? 

...And what would that imply about the upcoming plot in this particular narrative arc? 

...Well, Merrin doesn't have incredibly difficult problems.

 Maybe Estha is the one who has problems? That - would add a trope reason for why he's come up with arguments not to tell her, maybe, if his problems would immediately become the center of everything?