...The thing is, if she had been here with someone else from dath ilan, that person almost certainly would have had the obvious thought within, if not literally one minute, at least one day. 

And she knew an Estha in dath ilan, and if her Estha had been here from the beginning, he would absolutely have twigged to that almost right away. 

Merrin had quietly finished updating a while ago, apparently, that this Estha is not and probably ""never"" ""was"" her Estha from dath ilan, there were just - too many pieces of reasoning that she didn't think you could strip out of someone like that...

...maybe you can, though, when 'you' is referring to an [Outer God]. 

"That makes sense as a retrospectiveprediction if I'm correct that you just found the Bag broken and its contents are irrevocably lost," Merrin says. "....I'm registering a hypothesis that your reaction to that included - retrieving memories of actually being from dath ilan after all, before all of this happened, and that's the point at which the decisiontheory became obvious to you?"

He takes the chainmail protector, and the repaired Bag.  "I tried [Greater Make Whole] simply in case what I had been told about the Bag was wrong, but it was correct.  The Bag is empty; most of our previous hopes, lost."

"I think we should try to take this as a prompt for one of us to regain their memories, or have out their interaction, and hope that whatever we think of, after that, finally works.  There may not be much left to think of, we have already tried the obvious things, but then I have not in retrospect tried hard to think of nonobvious things."

"I have not regained memories, or at least, I don't think I have.  I have rather been using a spell, [Cultural Adaptation], that allows me to adopt and adapt to -- what you take to be your culture.  It allows me to pose thoughtexperiments to probe that supposed culture for information.  I learned decisiontheory by imagining how I would, if I were passing as a member of that culture, talk about our current situation to a twelve-year-old."

…Huh. That works? 

Well, apparently Laeirthe occasionally works to make Merrin think thoughts she did not seem to be on track to think on her own - though unfortunately not the basic decisiontheory of the situation - and he’s not even magic and in fact only has information and skills that Merrin has, just a slightly different mental angle and a different set of self-limiting beliefs. A spell that is literally magic, working as described, more or less has to be pulling in information that Estha wasn’t already aware of, right. Merrin already noticed some of that with Share Language, this is just - more powerful. 

Also, note how Estha did not tell them this fact at any earlier point.

Yeah yeah he was not being fully open with them she is aware of that. He said it was because he wanted her to trust him, didn’t want her to be suspicious - well, he said that about an entirely different matter but it would fit here, too.

“Why didn’t you explain about that [spell] before now?” Merrin says, rather than immediately blurting out her own theory. 

(She hasn’t entirely discarded ‘Estha is in fact originally from dath ilan and was altered, and Merrin’s memories are the accurate or at least less-altered ones’, but the observation that prompted it now has a counter-explanation so there’s no reason to weight it above any other hypothesis.)

"In retrospect it ended up not mattering.  But I was building up information to --" Cultural Adaptation (dath ilan) warns him that sane people do not make cases for a side "-- figure out whether or not your memories were false, with an eye to presenting all the cumulated evidence at once if it should lean in favor of your world being a dream.  Much of that evidence was being derived from Cultural Adaptation.  I didn't want to answer questions, prematurely, about what the spell was telling me."

"We have reached the point where it is time for me to make that case."

“I’m listening,” Merrin says, after only about five seconds of considering whether there’s anything else she wants to say first.

(If Estha has information he hasn’t been sharing, such that his greatest probability-mass is now on ‘dath Ilan is the setting which is less real’, then obviously she wants to know! Either whatever he’s about to say will hold together and make better sense of the facts she thinks she knows than anything else she’s thought of it so far, or it won’t, in which case she’ll be able to tell Estha why not and bring both of them one step closer to understanding what’s happening.)

(And…dath ilan feels a bit like a dream, at this point. It’s been months. Merrin is not considering this feeling to be evidence, particularly, it also makes perfect sense as a reaction to isolation, but it might be making it easier to sit down and listen to Estha telling her why he now thinks all of her memories are of a place that doesn’t exist.)

As dath ilan would say it, then, Esta presents his evidence.

"The simplest and largest point here should not be overlooked.  Your account is not self-consistent.  You have no explanation for how you got here.  For that reason alone, your story does not hold together.  My memories do hold together; we both encountered an [Outer God]."

"Point two.  Magic is real.  You have seen it with your own eyes.  You have become cloud and raced with the wind.  The imaginary world of dath ilan is one where, contrary to fact, magic does not exist.  Or, if you like, where magic has never been invented, despite dath ilan containing thousands of people supposedly smart enough to discover magic, and millions who could become [wizards]," he says that Utopian word for the first time, "and plenty of chemists to discover the useful properties of [spellsilver].  For that reason alone, dath ilan does not hold together as a story."

The first part sure does hold together as logic, and nods.

The second part is - hmm - 

“I think it would be coherent if dath ilan were in a different - region of a larger Reality,” such as FANFICTION SETTINGS oh wait she has Share Language vocabulary for this that isn’t so high context to convey, “- a different [plane], if there are [planes] where magic simply doesn’t work, it does sound like they come with a wide range of properties and of - distances from each other and thus accessibility. Some of your spells for reaching entities in other [planes] work here and some don’t. …I don’t think that refutes your argument here, your hypothesis could still be the one that fits best with all the known information, so - go on?”

It occurs to Merrin after she’s finished speaking that ‘the Keepers totally know about magic and have chosen to classify it as an infohazard’ is also not something she can entirely rule out with what she knows, but it’s an epicycle of complexity to add to a theory and also she should just hear Estha out first rather than get distracted.)

"I ask you this question I could not answer on my own."

"How certain are you that your technology is, itself, real?  I have seen machines I know to be real, if my own memories are true.  They have visible wheels, gears, ratchets, levers.  I can look at them and see how a blacksmith might forge them and a cartwright assemble them.  Your armor does not, to my eyes, have that nature.  It is not made visibly of parts that someone could make of ordinary metal, with a few exceptions that are themselves just the ordinary parts of your armor.  It could be something woven out of formlessness, or transformed from the armor you once wore, and all the stories you have of what's inside it could be nothing more than imagination and endless complications none of which are verified."

"To what extent, looking back on your own memories, does it seem to you like this could be true?"

What????????

“I understand how my armor works,” Merrin says, after a long ten seconds of just kind of boggling. “It's made of parts!" Admittedly she's spent less time on endless tedious maintenance where she isolates the exact component in its electronics that isn't working - it's nearly always the electronics, she had one genuine mechanical problem with a servo in the leg once and fixed it with cleaning and lubricant - and then figuring out whether it was possible to address on the software level or whether she had to dissect some other piece of equipment for replacement parts. 

Focus. "Have I not - explained computing tech at all? …I would have an extremely hard time replicating all of the technology it requires even if I had infinite time and no environmental hazards and fifty copies of myself, I’m not specialized in engineering or precision manufacturing, but, like, I know how computers work? I went to school?" 

She catches herself before going off on an entire tangent about that one book she read that one time where a character had to rebuild basic computing tech from scratch on another planet. She did actually skim some of the really technical bits, there, it wasn't the part she found the most fun. 

"...My feeling of understanding may not be conclusive, if your theory includes that an [Outer God] could actually simulate an entire alternatephysics world with technology and give me memories of it," she says. "Or if it could just - give me the feeling of understanding directly, and separately make all of my equipment behave predictably how I expect it to," which is a KIND OF TERRIFYING level of cognitive impairment to imagine herself having aaaaaaaa but 'that's terrifying' is not itself a counterargument to the theory. "But if I'm querying my own internal sense, then - all of my technology is made of parts that make sense to me and in a lot of cases I know in theory how they were made and just don't have the manufacturing capabilities here." 

"I suppose I can't rule out that your armor is made out of parts that are in some sense duplicable and that they make on distant planets.  If armor like that could exist, it would be invented somewhere -- though not without any magic in it -- and the [Outer God] could pick up the design from there."

"But is any of that the sort of thing where -- we could here and now run a test, and figure out whether it was all true or an [Outer God]'s casual piling of falsehoods on falsehoods?  Do the equivalent of forging one wheel, and verify that it behaves as a wheel should behave in a cart, with no further enchantment of it required?"

".....I think if I had a day to really focus on it I could come up with a bunch of advancepredictions on physics experiments we could actually run that are relevant to whether my technology can work the way I think it works," Merrin says. 

She has to still remember that much physics, right? School wasn't that long ago? ARGHHH she is KIND OF MAD at whatever [Outer God] entity is apparently setting up for her, of all people, to have to do that of all things, but that's a silly reaction. 

Honestly it probably wouldn't even take a whole day? If she tried for ten minutes she would have ideas, she just doesn't want to drop her conversation-context stack to do that on the spot and also she just needs to get over the instinctive flinch reaction to needing to make her brain do cognitive labor that isn't, specifically, emergency medicine. Why is Merrin like this. 

"Perhaps later."

"What are the chances, what is the probability, that you were a great enough person in dath ilan, special enough and the focus of enough attention, that the culture of dath ilan, if I queried it, ought to contain special rules just for Merrin?"

Um. 

What. 

What in the world could possibly have come up through his cultural translation spell that would prompt that question???? Does [Cultural Adaptation] somehow know about the Sparashki inside joke?????

No, it probably can't be that, that was only maintained as an actual little Conspiracy for, like, a few months, and it was in her hometown, it would be bizarre for the spell to consider a one-off trollspiracy five years ago as a fundamental part of the culture of dath ilan, surely... 

Merrin did become rather more of a public figure after that point, Laeirthe would like to note. 

...Sure, okay, she does televised Exception Handling sims and a lot of people watch them because Exception Handling is really epic. That's not a rule, that's just 'people have hobbies', and also it's not a her thing it's an Exception Handling thing, sure there are tons of cultural expectations around interacting with Exception Handling medtechs of her rank, that's not the same thing - 

Seriously why is she like this. 

.....Fine, fine, if Merrin actually stares at it, then - yeah, whatever, sure, she was maybe remotely enough of a minor celebrity to be a household name among the sort of households where someone followed Exception Handling medical sims, and that's...not not a class of people where, if they had a consistent preference, that might end up being enough of a consistent policy that anyone following the relevant subculture norms would know it, and maybe the [Cultural Adaptation] spell would pick up on it? Didn't Kalorm's sister, the celebrity musician one, have that thing... 

Um. 

It is driving Merrin WILD that she is completely failing to think of what the thing could possibly BE. She's so curious now! But, like, curious in a mildly panicked way! 

"Um, in general I think it wouldn't be that surprising for the reference class I was in," she says, after quite a long silence spent making faces. "I was a minor public figure in Exception Handling, I guess, a lot of the training scenarios I did were recorded for interested people to watch." 

Admittedly, it's more surprising that she doesn't know it. Merrin is pretty sure that Kalorm's sister - Mallor, right - is aware of her thing, like, that's why it's a thing, because she has a strong enough preference about it?

Seriously, what, what was it, does she have some sort of egregious personal habit and also a complete lack of meta-awareness of it and everyone quietly decided to just not make a big deal of it ever and also not tell her they were accommodating her on it because she would be self-conscious and it would reduce her work performance efficiency - which, fine, fair, she would - but, also, did the involved parties decide to also warn enough of everyone else that the flaming [Cultural Adaptation] spell has heard of it? That's so mortifying! Why did they think that was necessary, is she that inconvenient to accommodate in her weird quirk whatever it is she's still completely failing to think of what it could be - 

"......What was the rule."