There's an internal collision inside Esta's head as he considers his possible later need to swear upon his Law that all he's said to Mariona is true, versus what he is obviously required to believe about this question; and his brain makes an abortive moment in the direction of believing what he ought to believe, about whether he enjoys his job, and then dath ilan --

(actually his model of dath ilan, but Esta can't always tell the two apart, now)

-- yells at him that this is not something dath ilan considers swearable upon his Law, if he's a kind of entity that can immediately believe anything he chooses.  And that Merrin won't be fooled about it, either, what with her having already not been fooled.

"I enjoyed some parts more than others.  I liked hurting you and the other women I was mentoring.  I liked telling you, truthfully, that you could achieve greatness someday, and watching you squirm about that.  I was having more fun than you were, I am reasonably sure about that, and had you reached 4th circle you would've had more fun too.  But in the end, there was a job to be done.  And while it is a requirement of that job that you -- act on your own reasons, in a certain complicated sense," Esta is not, in the middle of this conversation, going to try to explain selfishness as a requirement of Asmodeanism, not least because Mariona always had trouble with that part, "our department is not set up to have its employees' fun as its first priority."

…Nod. That roughly makes sense. Merrin is making some quiet mental notes but she won’t make a bid to go further down that conversational subtree right now.

"Or perhaps the sharper way of putting it is that very few real, living people anywhere are having as much fun as you remember having.  We aren't."

"I now mean to [Share Language] with you again, and restore to you the true language of your birth; do not [save] against it.  And when I am done with all my speaking, I mean to place upon your own head my [headband], the magic item you've seen at the back of my head, that augments [Wisdom] and [Splendor], as a loan; so that you may have your very best chance of piercing through all delusions and illusions about yourself; and that to the best of my own knowledge is all that my headband does.  And I do [swear] upon my [Law] that I have spoken, and will speak, true."

[Swearing] on your [Law] is a sort of discount version of trying to predictably speak truth under what you claim to be your own adherence to the Algorithm, for people who've never heard of the Algorithm and couldn't begin to do the math about trying to have some sort of logical-counterfactual dependency on their Keepers' making a real oath about that, never mind actually being Keepers themselves.  It's built instead around mere incentives like your [aligment] changing.  That said, the word has a great deal of gravity and even some fear bound up in it; the speaker of this language took [oaths] pretty seriously.

Well, yeah, even in dath ilan most people are having less fun than Merrin.

(- quiet note of confusion: because Merrin is a person with high baseline wellbeing and a very low tendency to hedonic-treadmill on a particular source of fun, so - why isn’t alternate-Merrin, who might or might not be the “”original”” Merrin, also happier than average for her Civilization - what set of local social expectations and incentives would result in a Merrin who, it sounds like, actively disliked her job? It can’t just be that she was inexperienced and thus junior-ranked, that’s not how Merrin’s enjoyment of jobs works at all really -)

…Oh this conversation is serious. Like, obviously it already was serious, but it’s clear from Merrin’s body language that invoking “I do [swear] upon my [Law] that I have spoken, and will speak, true” has stepped up the gravity of this interaction considerably. 

…It’s a bit odd as a claim that Merrin personally, or the hypothetical alternate-Merrin who had grown up somewhere with only that discount concept of true oaths, would build an ideal fantasy-world with as much emphasis on the Algorithm as dath ilan has. Like, Merrin can function within that framework, but to Laeirthe it does seem like it’s not really entirely “her” “thing”? Which doesn’t refute the claim that an [Outer God] imagined dath ilan as a place Merrin would be happy, it does seem like cognitive infrastructure that matters for a Civilization being highly functional, just - Laeirthe is making a quiet mental note.

Well. Yeah. There's - a lot - in what Estha has said so far, and Merrin is juggling like eight pieces that feel in some way not-quite-right and she has no idea how far she can trust her own judgement and reasoning ability, the part of her that's returning that confusion - 

- but she hasn't given up entirely on the concept that it's possible to reason in truth-tracking ways. And she does want to know what's true, here, she wants to know that very badly, and - she wishes something about this conversation were going differently, and she's flagging that, too, as - maybe meaning something - but she isn't actually sure how to verbalize what she wants to be different so she's unlikely to get it by asking - 

...the information-asymmetry between them is part of it, and Share Language will help... 

"- Is the [Cultural Adaptation] [spell] one you could give me, for your - for my original - culture?" she asks. "It seems like it augments the translation [spell]." 

"Had I thought of it sufficiently earlier to prepare a day in advance -- were I not doing this suddenly, in hopes of producing visible progress on escaping this trap of a planet, and against fear of our [god] abandoning us for lost without the [Bag] -- I could have asked for two of [Cultural Adaptation], and given you one with [Imbue with Spell Ability].  It was a wise request, but not possible in this moment; I have used the only one I had."

"Do not be distracted by the languages I share with you; you will have a full day to ponder them later."

Share Language (Taldane, Infernal, Draconic).  Esta doesn't think Mariona had Draconic, actually, though he forgets what language she had instead.  But possibly the more languages in her mind that aren't Dark Tapestry, the better.

Merrin will endeavor not to get distracted by all her shiny new vocabulary. What if the [Outer God] makes a volcano erupt because actually it didn’t want them to resolve this and she DOESN’T have a chance later and is missing her only opportunity shut up, Merrin’s neuroticism. 

Okay, she speaks some languages now, which are not immediately giving her a feeling of familiarity any more than the other one he was Sharing with her did. Now what?

"The point at which I realized, was the point at which Cultural Adaptation claimed to me a thing about dath ilan's culture that was impossible to the point of plain absurdity, centered on you personally."

"The rule that Cultural Adaptation claimed to me was this:  You don't tell Merrin that she's special, or act around her like she runs in 7th-circle company.  You pretend that she is just another completely normal person.  It is not a rule for talking to young people, or a rule for men talking to women.  It is a rule about Merrin specifically."

"Need I remark on exactly how important and famous you would need to be, before a culture -- that by your accounts is not divided into #countries#(*), and spans an entire planet of a billion living people -- would have a special rule like that about you particularly, the way that a #country# has rules about how to address its #Queen#(**)?"

"Were you special enough, were you important enough, that a planet or even a single #country# would invent a culture-wide rule about everyone pretending that you were a very normal person and not at all special?"

"I liked to tease my Merrin, the real Merrin, about how I thought she had the potential for greatness someday.  But she wasn't that special already.  And in your stories, neither were you."

"Cultural Adaptation is screaming at me, right now, that I was absolutely not supposed to tell you that this rule existed.  Would it be remotely realistic, in real life, for such a conspiracy to be so universally adhered-to that nobody ever told you before now?  #Governments# can enforce that kind of rule successfully, with extreme enough penalties for violating it.  But there would need to be a strong motivation for the Governance you remember to go to that difficulty and expense.  It would not be done for your personal convenience, and if magic does not exist there could be no #ritual# reason for it."

"Dath ilan is not real.  It, or rather your memory of it, is a shadow of your fantasies -- your personal dreamworld to tempt you, except that you cannot live there, only remember it.  To be more exact, dath ilan is a shadow and projection of the original Merrin.  There is rare magic like that, and I had already heard of the general category; the difference in this Outer God's work lies in its completeness and its scale."

(*) Taldane:  Medium-sized cities that control large amounts of surrounding countryside and act as top-level authorities instead of answering to a planetary Governance.
(**) Taldane:  Female sorta-unilateral sorta-dictator of a #country#.

...Well, yeah, in hindsight that's pretty obvious. Also it's pretty hilarious. Right, Laeirthe? Did Merrin seriously manage to be Like That so hard that once she was a celebrity they made a whole Conspiracy to avoid embarrassing her? 

IT'S REALLY NOT FUNNY MERRIN CANNOT IMAGINE ANYTHING MORE EMBARRASSING 

Come on, they're losing focus here. Estha did not bring this up to tease Merrin, he brought it up as evidence that dath ilan can't possibly be real because the whole concept of that being a thing isn't coherent.

Is it evidence of that? 

...wait what is even the Governance structure of Estha's alternate-universe-setting, that's so weird– ugh she's trying NOT to get distracted with the new language, and it would be very easy to get distracted. 

On the one hand, obviously you could get a conspiracy adhered-to thoroughly enough that Merrin could have gone five years without catching on? People love conspiracies, is that not a thing in Estha's alternate-universe? It was trivial to get everyone nearby instantly on board with the whole "Merrin is a secret Sparashki" conspiracy, and that was literally just because it was funny, and admittedly that didn't go on long-term but that's because it's not actually funny anymore to permanently lie to everyone about Reality, once they're adults. 

Does Merrin...feel lied to about Reality, if in fact it's true that dath ilan existed and her memories are of things that happened and, also, the Civilization under which she was born had a Conspiracy lasting like five years to avoid telling her she was (flinch) (ugh) """special"""? 

- not really? If she had wanted to think about it, she could have noticed a lot of things at any moment? She doubts they were hiding, like, the viewership numbers on her sims, she just didn't actually check them? A Conspiracy to let everyone know that the polite way to talk to her was to avoid shoving the (squirm) (flinch) the thing, in her face, isn't obviously even that big of an ask? 

Wait that maybe explains that one weird confusing interaction she had with Kalorm that one time, when they were camping? Kalorm is one of the most likely people in dath ilan to look around at a policy set by Civilization and try to throw it out a window, but the thing about Kalorm is that he's also...nice...and wouldn't actually enjoy making Merrin incredibly uncomfortable on purpose, and - in hindsight Merrin is parsing that conversation as Kalorm gently offering her an opening to see through the Conspiracy, and then successfully noticing that Merrin's response was to metaphorically close her eyes and stick her fingers in her ears and sing loudly to herself. 

Wow. Apparently it's really easy to hide things from her if she has an internal incentive not to want to know. That's definitely pretty embarrassing. 

She's doing great! Laeirthe is quietly cheering Merrin on in the back of her head. She's already come so far along her Protagonist Growth Arc! A few months ago she would have been having way more of an internal emotional meltdown about this, even if she were able to engage with the premise at all. 

Well, she's done some pretty epic stuff on this exoplanet. It's...not that hard to admit, now, that while she's surely not the only person in dath ilan who could have survived here on her own as long as she did, the number of other people who could is probably tens and not hundreds? And "special" doesn't mean unique or the best in the world, she's neither of those things - well, except for the sense in which every single person is unique - but, yeah, taken overall she's...more successful than average. A lot more. SQUIRM. 

...of course, the fact that Merrin in hindsight finds it COMPLETELY AND MORTIFYINGLY PLAUSIBLE that her entire Civilization did that to her does not actually mean that Estha is wrong. The [Outer God] could have felt like simulating a civilization based on premises that made sense and would hold together. If Merrin were simulating an entire universe she would probably find it unsatisfying to be sloppy and lazy and declare all sorts of implausible things without justification? 

There are a lot of other places where she should be appropriately uncertain of what she thinks she knows and what she thinks it logically implies. Does she actually know how Estha's spell works and that it's perfectly reliable? No! 

Does she actually know that Estha is - okay, they have substantial reason to believe that in a narrow sense he's stating things he currently believes are true, he did swear on his Law, but - how sure should they be that his overall goal here is steering both of them toward the truth? 

....Merrin can't think of what else he could be steering for????? 

He'll come back to that. 

For now, it seems like probably this is the point at which Estha is going to segue from arguing that dath ilan can't exist, to explaining the world he believes does exist. And Laeirthe would really like to hear about that. He has quite a large number of unanswered questions. 

"...I need to reason through all of that on my own time later but I provisionally-accept-the-premise for the purposes of continuing your explanation," Merrin says, because it does feel like it would be deceptive to let Estha assume she's convinced when she's...not sure any of the individual arguments he's made, considered in isolation, have felt like a significant shift to her odds ratio rather than a small shift. 

He has been watching this thought process with some apprehension, because while he has learned the hard way that Mariona must be allowed pauses to think if she is to end up thinking at all, it is also only just now occurring to him how much this behavioral principle leans on his ability to beat wrong answers out of Mariona if she arrives at an incorrect thought after thinking.

To hear this as her response after thinking is... not good, not terrible.

But he will say the rest of his words all at once.

"There is not very much else to explain.  Your world is wildly economically inconsistent.  You were not even allowed to know your own pay inside the dreamworld except that you could afford whatever you wanted.  And while that is consistent with your being a 7th-circle adventurer earning 7th-circle pay, the priceratios between unskilled labor and a day's basic meal and what the supposedly average person earns and what supposedly skilled people earn and the prices of the technology you have instead of #magic items#, are all wildly off from what they are in #Golarion# --"

(it is the name of a planet, Esta's home planet, and the word means Cage -- not the sort of cage that holds a mortal, the sort of Cage that holds an Outer God trapped inside it)

"-- though I don't know how to quickly convince you, that the economy you remember is the one that is wild and wrong, and not the economy I remember.  But there may be some anomaly there if you look for it, above and beyond the mad supposition that in your memories you avoided knowing your own salary.  Nothing about my memories is suggestive of huge facts I had to carefully avoid learning."

LOL

"-- with the admitted exception of a whole lot of material related to Outer Gods and their cognitohazards, now that I say it, and I should, not think about that, but think about whether there's anything suspicious about the ways I'm not supposed to think about it."

LOL