...and finds the chainmail protector of his Bag of Holding, enclosing the torn magical scraps of his punctured and destroyed Bag; scraps that, it seems, no longer qualify as a Bag of Holding for the purposes of Locate Object; its contents now scattered into the Astral Plane and lost forever, even should the Bag be repaired.

He doesn't even have Cultural Adaptation running, right now, but he can hear dath ilan's voice in his head, asking him if he's sure of all that he's been told, so he tries, he still tries.

Greater Make Whole.

You are now the proud holder of a fully repaired, completely empty Bag of Holding.

You know, if you had been willing to really think about and consider this exact possibility, you could have tried Locate Object on the chainmail protector for the Bag and saved yourself a lot of work, in retrospect.

...what purpose would there be in casting a spell that could only possibly deliver terrible news?

Dath ilan is definitely going to have a thorough answer to that one, if you actually run Cultural Adaptation for it and imagine yourself explaining it to a twelve-year-old, but just your mental model isn't going to have the same quality of answer.

Actually... you should probably imagine dath ilan explaining the decision theory of this sort of weird situation with Yog-Sothoth to a twelve-year-old.  You've never had those lectures off Aspexia Rugatonn in her own person, and dath ilan will be better at it than she is anyways.

Esta will maybe take that off the actual Cultural Adaptation spell but it is absolutely fucking not acceptable for his mere mental model of the spell to think anything unflattering about the Most High, ever.

Esta is angry and looking for something to hit, apparently.  Good thing Esta's model of the Cultural Adaptation spell is hard to make suffer!

You probably want to make sure that by the time you've finished walking back to camp, you're no longer in a mood to do something incredibly stupid and self-destructive that would impair your relationship with your co-survivalist.

And why is he going to walk instead of using Word of Recall?

In case Asmodeus sees in Esta what he has now learned, and Esta doesn't get new spells next time he prays.  Maybe possibly Esta would get to keep an emergency Word of Recall, then, if he still had it as a spell going in.

Esta walks back to camp, thinking hard along the way.

Merrin is waiting back in their new shelter!

Somewhat more distracted and on edge than usual, perhaps, because she knew Estha was going out to try something that might or might not work, but she's not going to succumb to just sitting around worrying when she can, instead, think of literally anything productive to do, even if it's just working on her tidal-cycle access model for their cave entrance. 

She looks up expectantly when Estha comes back. The hard way, not with Word of Recall, which - is probably evidence that it didn't work - but she'll wait for an actual explanation rather than guessing wildly, how about that. 

He has set Tongues and Cultural Adaptation running now, maybe for the last time if his next prayers go poorly, and imagined himself explaining the decision theory of the situation as though to a dath ilani 12-year-old --

If the decision theory isn't complicated, the reason to run a spell "that can only deliver bad news" as early as possible is to save yourself an insane amount of effort running other searches that in reality won't turn up positive answers.

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not thinking about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it is true, it is what is there to be interacted-with.
People can stand what is true, because they are already enduring it.

And if you're in a more complicated decision-theoretic dilemma than that, with Yog-Sothoth playing the role of Omega*, then you don't search for the Bag of Holding at all until something interesting has happened that creates at least a chance that Yog-Sothoth's game is finished and you will be allowed to go home.

Otherwise the search really can do nothing but deliver bad news that is the search's fault.

Because Yog-Sothoth will have intervened or just selected initial conditions on the basis of filtering out possibilities where you find your Bag and then go home.

If you'd been smart enough to say, 'If Yog-Sothoth graciously lets me find the Bag, I will graciously refrain from using its contents to depart this planet until something interesting has happened to me', perhaps you would have found your Bag, nice and intact, the first time you ran Locate Object near the place it was lost.

Or if that certainty of eventual escape had itself negated Yog-Sothoth's scenario, you should have run a simple search or no search at all, just to check the basic assumption that Yog-Sothoth wasn't letting you undo Its intervention to place you here with an altered Mariona.  You could have saved slightly more effortful searches for later, after they would be allowed to succeed.

(*)  Lit. 'decision-theory+troll' spoken with the tonal marker for a proper name.

It's a ludicrously simple problem with no hidden gotchas and no math required.  Even Aspexia Rugatonn would get that one.

You have only yourself to blame for not asking Cultural Adaptation about this earlier.  You should have realized that Cultural Adaptation (dath ilan) was so much more Lawful and wise than yourself as to stand in the same sort of superior relationship to you as Rugatonn or Gorthoklek.

(Esta cannot fully tell, at this point, which inner voice is actually Cultural Adaptation and which is just his model of Cultural Adaptation, but this last part is in fact being delivered by the latter.)

"We need to talk."

Well that’s kind of ominous.

(She has, in hindsight, been in a holding pattern for a while, waiting for - something, that did not feel within her power to steer. Laeirthe has pointed out several times that this is not protagonist behavior. Laeirthe is pointing out now that if something just happened to break her out of that holding pattern, and she doesn’t like the result, the tropes logic says that that’s kind of on her for not manifesting more agency without that prompting. Laeirthe can shut up and let her focus now, okay.)

“Okay,” Merrin says, putting away her electronics screen. “What is it?”

"Big serious conversation protocols," dath ilan says through Esta.  "Clear your mental stack, check if you're hungry or need to use the bathroom first."

(Esta's own Ring of Sustenance kicked again some time earlier, so neither of those apply to him.)

…Flicker of confusion, that’s - she wouldn’t have thought that the translation spell would just come with that cultural affordance, which Merrin is finding she wouldn’t obviously expect of someone from the culture that speaks the language Estha Shared with her, and she doesn’t think she’s told any anecdotes about dath ilan that included it -

Doesn’t really matter, in this moment. Maybe it’s such an obviously good idea that most cultures have such an affordance, and the translation spell is just doing its normal thing and translating how to clearly request it in Baseline. Just an observation to register and properly consider later.

Merrin ate recently but she should in fact use their (newly improved) bathroom facilities, which will give her time to get her head free of times and dates and spatial software models and back onto -

…Estha learned something, and whether it’s good or bad news, it’s - not straightforward -

Oh no maybe it was NOT a neuroticism-false-alarm her social anxiety WAS right that he’s been silently super mad at her for days— not helpful to immediately dive into a branching possibility-tree of what she might have done to hurt his feelings. Clear her mental stack, have the actual conversation, definitely don’t pre-emptively apologize at him when she doesn’t even know what she’s apologizing for. Merrin is capable of that. 

She comes back from the bathroom and sits down, on one of the woven-chairs opposite the other woven-chair for Estha. She indicates that she’s ready for a big serious conversation. 

"I have realized that I have been doing the decisiontheory of this all wrong."

"We should have performed at most a perfunctory early search of the sites immediately near where the Bag of Holding was lost, to verify the guess that the [Outer God] would not let us find it easily."

"Until the two of us had done something interesting, that required us to be both be in this place with incompatible memories and those memories interacting through us, our best guess said that the [Outer God] would not let us find the Bag of Holding and successfully leave.  Because that would undo Its initial intervention."

"Every time we searched a greater radius, every time we tried a new clever manipulation or spell to let ourselves leave earlier, we were, in the best case, forcing the [Outer God] to move the Bag of Holding further away, by altering our initial conditions and the results foreseeable by prophecy.  In the worse case, It would not care to expend that much effort, and would instead simply select conditions for the Bag to end up torn loose from its chainmail shielding, punctured, and destroyed.  As would irrevocably lose the Bag's contents, even were the Bag later repaired.  Locate Object, for a Bag of Holding, will not find a Bag that has been broken and is no longer a Bag of Holding."

Wow Laeirthe should really have thought of that. 

Is he saying that - yeah, it sure sounds like he's saying that, and it would explain the big serious conversation - 

- it does not, by itself, explain the - everything? 

Merrin is having a hard time pinning down what she means, there? And some part of her mind is plaintively protesting that, like, surely the [Outer God] could TELL that she is a simple medtech who is not very smart and that, relatedly, she finds that shape of decisiontheory reasoning bizarrely crazymaking and is honestly even worse at thinking of it than one would think based on her actual measured thinkoomph scores. And, like, is it embarrassing that she didn't? Sure! It's not very complicated! Is it a new sort of cognitive failure that requires making an update about herself: not really? She doesn't think? Merrin has been stubbornly trying to stay focused on the logistics because everything else feels like quicksand and she knows that's a flaw but, see, it was LESS OF ONE WHEN SHE LIVED IN DATH ILAN, surrounded by people who inexplicably liked to reason through bizarre decisiontheory hypotheticals for fun– 

(Come on, that's not even weird, that's a normal thing to enjoy and Merrin is the weird one here.)