Oh, right.  Esta is not used to the particular failure modes of technology.  A magical item either works or it takes so much damage as to completely lose function, you can't bonk a staff into a rock and have it lose the capability to cast just one spell.  Merrin's armor was Still Working, so it didn't occur to him that -- but enough <failure-excuses>, Esta thinks in Infernal.

Greater Make Whole.

OH RIGHT THAT SPELL EXISTS and Merrin is very silly. 

She uses the voice interface to make the faceplate pop open. 

(Feeling embarrassment or being mad at herself for failing to think of that immediately can wait until they're actually doing a failure-analysis debrief later.) 

He reaches a hand toward her face, but then hesitates.

"Should I be using the Heal for this, or trying to practice nonmagical medicine on you instead?"

"Ha ha very funny," Merrin says, exhaustedly. 

(It's parsing to her as obviously a joke, because her Estha teases her constantly all the time - and she often can't tell that he's teasing her rather than being serious unless it's obvious from context, which he thinks is hilarious and which definitely incentivizes more teasing, so she eventually just ended up with a pretty high prior that anything that made her go ???????? when interpreted seriously was probably a joke. And, like, there's not even obviously a good argument for her to prioritize teaching Estha non-magical medicine at all, given that it takes years to be an expert in it, and even if it was a priority this would be a blatantly really stupid time for it, when someone is starting out you only have them practice in simulated scenarios and not on someone with actual injuries. And it wouldn't even occur to her that her Estha might be getting any enjoyment or entertainment out of her pain in this particular situation.) 

"Who knows but that the entire reason the [Outer God] placed you here was in order to allow for the practice of more nonmagical medicine?"

"Do I recall correctly that it's the box on the furthest left which has the {duck tape}?"

oh no what if he has a point

no, surely the cool tropey plot beat here would be if Estha was forced to use nonmagical medicine due to being out of healing spells, you can't hit the same note by just refusing to use healing spells you totally have, then it's just implausible and uncool

...Her Estha would probably not keep up the bit for that long just to tease her.

Merrin is reminding herself that she is not, in fact, certain she knows all of the differences between the Estha she remembers and this one. It does lowkey bother her to be the first one to stop going along with the joke, BUT maybe he just in fact doesn't understand how messed up she is? Because he has the Belt, and whatever other form of toughness lets him run into like ten times that many rocks and still be fully coherent - on reflection that's kind of plausible, and like, Merrin has both a high pain tolerance and a bunch of competitiveness about it, it might not be obvious - 

(It's going to be extremely obvious. By dath ilan's standards, Merrin has an extraordinarily high pain tolerance and an unusual ability to appear less distressed by it even if it's in fact bothering her, but dath ilan and Cheliax are extremely different places.) 

"Not actually funny can you please just heal me," she says tightly.

Vicar Esta is surprised, then, and confused, and offended, and indeed outraged, but he keeps it off his face.

It takes him a moment, without Cultural Adaptation running, to decide that this is probably not the point where Merrin springs a trap to see if she can make 'Estha' act utterly out of character.  She probably thinks that it is in-character for Merrin to say such a thing, to her Estha, and for her Estha to comply.  And of all the times in which to try to explain to altered-Mariona that she is not behaving correctly, this is probably not optimal.  He has only a split second to decide it, if he will comply, and Esta had not previously planned to optimally confront Mariona in such a moment, so he will not confront her now.

Esta overrides rather a lot of feelings, and taps Merrin on the nose.

Heal.

And now Merrin is no longer injured! She's still kind of shaken, but she's inclined to be stubborn and not explicitly say she needs a break to calm down after that - or maybe it's not just the being-competitive, here, something about that interaction felt off and it seems like everything is fine now but it still left her uneasy. 

She sits up. "Well. I think that plan also needs some more work." 

The nights are continuing to get shorter. Esta's next prayers will be due a full hour after the next planetary dawn, which is itself a few hours after high tide.

After that: there will be a tidal bore that [day] before 24 hours have elapsed and it's time to pray again, if they want to use it! The tidal bores are about 37 hours apart, so sometimes if one falls early in a particular [day], the next one will fall late on the next consecutive [day]. And this one will be in daylight, making navigation and obstacle-avoidance a lot easier! It's due at 36:00, which is of course timed to nearly the hottest part of the late-spring-or-early-summer-or-whatever afternoon, but with Endure Elements and Planetary Adaptation neither of them will be inconvenienced - but not for almost 21 hours after Esta finishes getting his spells, so they're much less crunched on planning time. 

Merrin is apparently continuing to replace sleep with absurdly powerful healing magic; she got a Heal just before midnight, at which point it was the middle of the night and yet she was wide awake and full of energy, and ended up plowing the entire night into working on her software map of the caves. 

(She makes a mental note that it sure would be nice if she could avoid getting herself injured again this [day], since she's ended up getting both of the two most recent Heals. Which is admittedly mostly because she was the one exposing herself more directly to hazards on the two most recent plans, but she still feels like it's only fair for Esta to also get a chance to reset to no-exhaustion on his next [day].) 

She has some ideas for new things to try. Literally just doing it in daylight, and having already had a practice run with the rope towing Estha throwing off her hydrodynamics, might already make a big difference for her obstacle-avoidance abilities, but she also wants to propose that Estha consider loaning her the Belt. She's clearly a lot more quickly incapacitated by injuries, since she is a normal human person and he's some kind of weirdly resilient magic person, but it also seems like she really needs to be present and swimming in the water for their whole plan of covering as many kilometers as possible in a single Extended Locate Object spell duration by using the tidal bore current speed to work, like, at all. She mostly needs to figure out how to get through the first two minutes without accumulating any injuries or damage to her armor that reduce her maneuverability? The actual swimming difficulty will get incrementally easier as they fall further behind the main wave, but that only helps if her swimming abilities aren't decreasing even faster. 

She'll propose a plan B: make a new boat, one with better maneuvering characteristics and also better sturdiness, out of local materials so it doesn't matter that it's inevitably going to get destroyed anyway and its remnants will probably not be possible to retrieve for repairs. But that calls for more lead time, she'll need to do an out-to-sea mission to harvest enough of the various kinds of strapwrack for it, and given that there's a tidal bore again, and Estha continues to have the best emergency-evacuation trick ever, she thinks they haven't yet exhausted the potential of their extremely silly plan to have Merrin tow an Air Walking Estha upstream on roller skates. 

...Also, she's going to tell Estha, as casually as she can manage, that if it's an okay time for it, then there's a personal conversation she'd like to have at some point and she would rather do it while he's using Tongues and can speak Baseline. 

(This is SO AWKWARD but Merrin is kind of feeling like she's irresponsibly put it off too many times already. She needs to actually be on the same page as Estha about what their current ""relationship"" is or she's going to make some kind of really stupid cultural misstep. In fact, possibly she has already made, like, twenty incredibly awkward cultural missteps and is hurting his feelings constantly and he just hasn't said anything because their survival is a higher priority? ...Anyway, miscommunications and resulting shenanigans might, perhaps, be entertaining and even funny from a sufficiently outside perspective, but any dath ilani protagonist would obviously respond to a situation like this by not making the stupid mistake.) 

Esta has no life experience to be wary of a girlfriend telling him that they need to talk.  Back below 4th, he had some experience with a girlfriend telling him that he's failed her and will pay in pain; but not that they need to talk.  The Chelish system is not entirely without advantage.

Tongues, Cultural Adaptation.

"Sure," says Esta in Baseline.

This is MORTIFYINGLY AWKWARD AAAAAAA.

“We each remember different things about the world we came from,” she says. “We’re - clearly not acting toward each on the basis that really we just met a few days ago - I’m not sure if I could successfully set-aside-my-preconceptions and interact with you as a stranger, it’s too - you feel too strongly like the same person. But we don’t really know each other, not like in the memories each of us has about the other.”

She takes a deep breath. “- And we’re in a situation where we’re relying heavily on the other being - reliable and low-friction-to-coordinate/with - and that’s hard, when we’re missing context on each other.”

Well, really it’s mostly Merrin missing huge swaths of context on Estha’s life. She herself hasn’t been deliberately concealing anything about dath Ilan or her life there, though she also hasn’t tried to represent herself as definitely telling him everything. The only part she’s explicitly keeping to herself is that Laeirthe - exists, for some very odd definition of existence - and doesn’t trust Estha.

So far so good.

“…And something I haven’t asked about, because it - feels weird - is the status of your relationship with the me you remember. Partly because you’ve expressed reluctance to share some information on - things I might have forgotten - and I don’t know how closely adjacent that is.”

She shrugs slightly. “I finally thought, maybe that isn’t the information I actually need to have, to - not be unproductively stressed about social missteps - and the important part is having a relationshipnegotiation about the current relationship, between me as I am now, and you as you are now. And making sure we’re not - having a mutual-illusion-of-transparency around very different assumptions, that might cause a conflict at a really inconvenient time if we don’t address it.”

Merrin hesitates for a moment, and then goes ahead and says the thing she was hesitating over whether to say. “…I don’t know if the game the [Outer God] is playing here might involve romance - stuff - but it’s a hypothesis that came to mind for me.” 

It sure does come up sometimes in alternative-universe crossover fanfiction.

The word relationshipnegotiation sure is echoing in his mind, in Tongues, and in Cultural Adaptation.

Mariona's dreamworld has what sort of custom.  Why.  Is the concept here that you do a bunch of Lawful logistics and paperwork before anyone is allowed to have sex with you.  Why wouldn't sex just not exist... well, if she'd gotten Dark-Tapestry-inverted into enjoying it, only, she hasn't been inverted around fantasizing about nonmagical medicine and this is Esta's first time properly noticing the degree to which his two main hypotheses are directly and oppositely colliding -- which is somehow a kind of thought that dath ilan Cultural Adaptation also seems to believe Esta ought to be thinking and maybe saying something about.  And why would that element be a fantasy-projection or inversion of Mariona, that whole part seems like something that would come out of the Dark Tapestry rather than her --

And that's a third distinct hypothesis!

Tracking all these ideas separately, and trying to distinguish between them by experiment, is definitely part of Our Culture!  Merrin will be surprised if you seem bad at it.  Can't blend in without it!

And Merrin, very plausibly since she is the one saying it, thinks the [Outer God] is doing what?  Trying to set up a romance?

Esta hasn't read a lot of 'romance novels' since that literary form was invented a few years back -- though he has heard that many of those novels are good enough as sheer literature to be read by men, if they don't mind the implicit messages those novels send about men's place in the universe and their ultimate inferiority of wit and power to the female protagonists.  But he has heard about a general concept of what romance is like, for the sort of Chelish person who's into relationships more complicated and less entirely Lawful than 'I get sex and you get to suffer' --

Please pay attention to the actual Baseline word 'romance' and how much it doesn't sound like Abrogail Thrune's personal hobbies.

what is this profoundly alien affair out of the Dark Tapestry that sounds like Shelyn raped Abadar and forced Him to bear Her baby

To outer appearances, alter-Estha will appear to very carefully consider this conversational topic, looking (to dath ilani eyes) like he is processing it with all of the gravity that it deserves.  There's a way you look when you are thinking carefully before responding, and Estha definitely looks that way, for a time.

"I have been considering several different hypotheses about ways in which you might systematically and predictably differ from the Merrin I knew," says alter-Estha.  It's strange how much more familiar he sounds when he speaks Baseline.  (Because Esta has made a habit of contemporaneously casting Cultural Adaptation afterwards every time, a spell whose distinct existence and purpose he has not actually mentioned to Merrin.)  "Was one of my early guesses correct that this version of you does enjoy sex, and that you would have been displeased if your version of Estha had tried to assist you in your career?"

…

…

…Merrin has QUESTIONS about what exact process might have generated exactly those two specific differences??? 

Also oh no that sure makes it sound like they were NOT dating in the alternative-universe and she’s been making everything super weird 

“I would have been extremely confused if the you I remember had ever offered to do anything about my career, because as I said we did not work in the same department,” she says. “I don’t think it would - offend me, as a concept - but it would be pretty weird.”

(The understanding Merrin has formed of what ‘assisting her in her career’ could even look like has mostly resolved onto, like, one-on-one training on some specialized skill, because dath ilan has much less of a route by which ‘Estha speaks to her Exception Handling supervisors about her’ could, like, change anything much about her career trajectory.)

- wait, no. “Wrongthought,” Merrin says, “I’m realizing that if I’d known you earlier in my life, and you happened to know enough about my hobbies to notice my unusual stamina and point me out to someone at Exception Handling, I - well, it would’ve still been weird and a bit uncomfortable, maybe, I - don’t like attention - but it would be better for Civilization, probably, so I wouldn’t have been mad.”

The second part of the question is still giving her some trouble because. Um. Merrin is not actually that ridiculously easily-embarrassed about sex stuff, it’s just incredibly weird to talk about it with the alternate-universe version of your boyfriend who, it sounds like, was not having any form of sex with the alternate-universe you.

“…It’s complicated to what extent I like sex,” she says. “I don’t think I can round it off to either a yes or a no.”

The reason she had wanted to have this conversation in Baseline was that she had noticed a massive area of missing vocabulary. Merrin is somewhat worried that this means the other-world Estha is also going to be missing concepts and she will need to do a lot of mortifying explanation.

…no, he has to know that masochists exist, there was that one comment he made - actually, what, wait, Merrin is now very confused how that could possibly fit with “they’re not dating” - did she misparse completely what he meant, or does his culture exclude kink from the category “sex”, that would be weird but it’s not impossible to imagine, she supposes…

“I’m a masochist,” she says, “I like kink stuff a lot more consistently in more circumstances than I like, you know,” no she canNOT assume he knows there is a CULTURE GAP here, “um, sex acts involving genital contact.” 

Hey Merrin. Notice that, technically, Estha did not say he didn’t have sex with Merrin. Only - unless Merrin is parsing it backward and those were meant to be similarities and not differences, but he doesn’t think so - only that she didn’t like it. 

What the flaming toilet paper, Laeirthe! 

It’s an explanation for why he would even know that! Anyway, surely Merrin can understand the concept of a man pressuring a woman to have sex she doesn’t like, because some people are not very prosocial? 

(Laeirthe, to be clear, is not actually assessing this as a very likely explanation! He is just considering it his responsibility to be on the lookout for when Merrin is filtering her hypotheses about Estha-behavior to only include the charitable ones.)

Hypothesis noted now can he PLEASE SHUT UP AND LET HER FOCUS.