Dude, nobody from dath ilan would give up on that problem without thinking about it for like thirty seconds.

(This thought is suppressed by midlevel generalizations before it can fully form, since it would result in heretical thinking, which constitutes failure at the problem of thinking.)

Something deeply and very long-buried inside Esta, hammered down and down and down under different circumstances and still-hardwired inside him nonetheless, is interested in the prospect of horrible things not happening later.  If there is a way to accomplish that, it would quite like to know, or think about it if thinking about it would not itself be horrible.

It tries to push harder for the Learned Cultural Adaptation thought to come out.

This is going directly against a lot of learned patterns and learned forbidden-patterns and midlevel generalizations.

The result is that Esta continues staring blankly into space without fully forming any verbal thoughts for some number of moments.

His face stays slack in its default configuration.

He feels like he'd like to scream very loudly.

This has also been conditioned-against incredibly thoroughly.

His brain briefly suggests that surely it would be Approved to wail in despair and terror and dismay about having been abandoned by Asmodeus as His cleric -- that this would be deemed an appropriate reaction by the Church -- and doesn't get very far, because obviously according to midlevel generalization openly screaming would constitute failure at something.  It's not so much that Merrin would be unimpressed, as that all the other people watching at the time the midlevel generalization was formed, would be unimpressed.

Esta doesn't particularly wish that he had a wand of Fox's Cunning, because he doesn't actually know that +4 Cunning would result in a different outcome for his own thought processes.  He's never had a Fox's Cunning and doesn't know what it can do.

(The same applies to wishing for an education in Computer Science (dath ilan), or training in thinking generally.)

...he should follow Merrin and ask her to explain what she means by that while she's still got Share Language (Taldane), because he can foresee a lot of stupid and unpleasant future conversation that will be even more agonizing if it's conducted in halting partial language.

This internal outcome is produced after horrible tearing feelings of internal conflict which would themselves constitute failure to consciously notice.

He goes to where Merrin is trying to do her non-urgent calculations, a longer walk than before they moved to the expanded hab but still a very short walk.  "It's a waste of our remaining Taldane, but less of a waste of our remaining Taldane than doing nothing with it in the face of an unpleasant conversation that is obviously going to happen anyway," Esta states.  "How do you imagine that you are going to, as you put it, keep me out of Hell?"

Do they have to have that conversation right now. He has a good point about the language but DO THEY HAVE TO. Merrin has been having a REALLY BAD DAY, okay, and admittedly Estha seems to be...taking his own bad day worse than she's taking hers? unless secretly she's being just as concerning and just having a complete failure of self-awareness about it?...but, like, from an objective outside perspective, is "being dropped as a cleric by his horrible doomgod" actually a worse day to be having than LEARNING THAT HELL EXISTS AND TRILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE IN IT. 

Merrin is maybe a little bit mad at Estha, actually, and had been kind of maybe hoping to avoid any substantive interactions until after she's had a chance to float in an ocean under the stars for twelve hours straight and regain some kind of mental equilibrium. 

"I literally just told you I have no idea how yet," she says. "I'm still mostly at the planning stage where I figure out how to get more resources or allies, and I'm probably going to be mostly generating bad ideas that won't work for a while, and like I said I'm not expecting your help. I can understand why it would be - scary - if you think I can't possibly succeed and Asmodeus would be mad. ...The only bad idea that probably won't work that I've come up with so far is somehow finding a way to - keep your soul on this planet? if you die?" 

Probably cryo would not do that, and also ughhhhhhh he doesn't have Baseline and she has no vocabulary in "Taldane" for 'cryo' and doesn't feel like explaining it the long way, even though it won't exactly be easier to explain when she's relying on remembered and recorded vocabulary only.

(She has been reading all of her tidal patterns documentation out loud to herself, in alternating word-pairs with the best approximate translation, and she's intending to keep doing that on whatever text she can find or by retelling stupid fanfic out loud to herself until the Share Language runs out, it's faster and more compatible with multitasking than writing vocabulary down and she'll have all the time she wants later to process the recording into a dictionary.) 

"- and with more resources or allies, if any of those plans work out, I could try to get both of us sufficiently far away that Asmodeus can't find you." Shrug. "I don't think those are good ideas but that wasn't even an entire five minutes of thinking about it. I guess if you feel like explaining why it's impossible, that would give me a better sense of the problem constraints." 

Less consideration than Merrin would usually use went into checking whether any of that was maybe a bad idea to say, though she did deliberately not bring up, for example, the idea of trying to scream-thoughts-into-the-void as loudly as she can at the hypothetical god of Let's Solve This Hell Problem, or any other plan that would involve fighting rather than running away.

(She's also not going to be completely hiding in her body language that she's irritated about the interruption and perhaps with Esta more broadly.) 

"Trap the Soul is an 8th-circle wizard spell that puts somebody, body and soul, into a gemstone.  Nobody sensible considers it a means of escaping Hell, because eventually somebody breaks the stone and you're back in the same situation as before.  Asmodeus would hunt you down.  Morrigna psychopomps would hunt you down.  Marut inevitables would hunt you down.  Time would crumble the stone to dust.  It doesn't matter whether it takes a thousand years or ten million years, it changes nothing."

"As for your second idea, we aren't likely to get back even to Golarion or dath ilan.  Getting my soul outside of Creation and Pharasma's judgment seems like a 'stretch goal' indeed, as you put it."

ohheyisTHATwhyanyoneevertriestobargainwiththeDarkTapestry

It's not actually reasonable to be finding this interaction as enraging as she is, Merrin tells herself firmly. Her frustration isn't really in response to any of what Estha is saying, which is - reasonable to bring up from his own perspective, and helpful information to have on her side, and she's somewhat confused on what he even wants to get out of arguing with her, what's even the point in convincing her not to try when, if he's right, he can just let her try and fail, but it's in expectation probably going to help if he's willing to talk to her and she can get more information, so she should do the thing that achieves her goals and not tell him to please go away...

She's been awake for a pretty long time, hasn't she. Ugh, she's going to have to go back to budgeting time to sleep, now that she can't just almost entirely replace sleep with powerful healing magic. Anyway, it makes sense that she's cranky and a bit stupid, but Merrin has trained on scenarios where she had to do objectively harder things than having a conversation with someone she's mad at, while objectively more fatigued than she is right now. Stop whining and just do it. 

“Oh, so trapping a soul is a thing in principle," Merrin says sunnily. "I wasn't sure. I don't have access to wizard spells right now, so unless that changes I would be trying to figure out something non-magical, which probably doesn't work at all but if it did work it would have different constraints. ...It's unclear to me why Asmodeus would prioritize tracking your soul down on another planet if he didn't think it was worth Aspexia Rugatonn's spells to get you back alive? You would think a living 6th circle cleric would be more valuable to him than one more soul out of trillions."

(Does the Share Language care to inform her what in the world a "Morrigna psychopomp" is, or a "Marut inevitable"? Are they the sort of thing that could annihilate Merrin from existence, because as long as there's still a Merrin, she's going to keep working on trying to make it so there isn't a Hell anymore in a thousand years there are all sorts of ways for Merrin to stop existing, it might even be the default outcome here, she has no idea how the ending-up-here thing worked, she doesn't know that she'll respawn on another planet again if she just dies here. But if she DOES then she will be VERY ANNOYED and then she will get back to work on her stupid enraging research project of finding Golarion and recruiting allies and solving their Hell problem.) 

"...It's not a -" crux? no one-syllable word for that, "- a deciding factor, for me, whether this is actually possible. In my culture, a legendary hero," SEE KALORM SHE SAID IT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE, SO THERE, "would never just take at face value that a problem was impossible, if it was important, and this is important to me, and if I'm going to be stuck in a stupid ridiculous game played by an Outer God then I might as well stop whining about how I don't like it and try playing to win. You might've had more luck convincing your Mariona to be more ambitious if you could've given her a project she would actually want to succeed at. That being said, I do wonder if it was in the interests of your," word for 'the Governance-like organization working for Asmodeus?', "- of the church of Asmodeus, to conceal information about solutions and convince you it's a harder problem than it actually is." 

(Psychopomps are guides of the dead; they sound True Neutral, and like outsiders, and like they're associated with the Creator.

Inevitables sound Lawful Neutral and like outsiders.

Maruts sound scarier than Morrigna.)

Again the collision of forces inside his brain.

Of course if there was a way out of Hell, the Church wouldn't tell him.

Mid-level generalizations prevent that.

The vocalization 'The Church wouldn't lie to us like that' is generated, and then struck from consideration because what if Merin can figure it out (deeper desire, blocked overtly, continues to exert pressure of rationalization): obviously Merrin would not believe that, obviously, what with it being blatantly false, so he shouldn't say that and lose her trust (the deeper desire is happy with this conclusion and does not permit further reasoning about whether Merrin would in fact not believe it or if there are things he could say to make her believe it)

(...And wouldn't it have been nice if he could get Mariona like, 20% this 'ambitious', and not any more ambitious than that.)

The question of whether Mariona could have been like this if she liked her job doesn't promise good things to any level of him and is therefore dropped from processing.

"Of course if there was some cheap escape from Hell, they wouldn't tell us.  That doesn't mean there is one."

"And yes, before you ask, we are indeed instructed that Hell will not be pleased if, having died, they find that I was trying to figure out a way to escape Hell.  That doesn't mean there's a way out.  Mortals are stupid.  Let them run around thinking and thinking and thinking about whether they can please themselves more, and eventually they will make a mistake while evaluating some stupid plan and decide it's a brilliant one.  Then they'll run off to please themselves, and then go to Hell and be worse off than if they'd obeyed when told what to not think about."

(Esta's overt rationalization for saying this:  Perhaps it will be useful to have Merrin more sympathetic to him.)

(Esta's actual collision of incoherent impulses:  It's Complicated.)

If Merrin had any way of knowing that any part of Esta's reasoning in saying that was to appear sympathetic, she would be staring in bemusement at how in the world he could possibly be modeling that as a sympathy-garnering thing to say! ...And, in the course of noticing that confusion, might make other observations that would perhaps be useful to make sense of how Esta is ""thinking"", which - if she had full visibility of it is - is not a process that Merrin would have thought to use the word "thinking" to describe.

She would also be pretty bemused at the implicit expectation that he still had any of her trust to lose, except that on further consideration she would grant that it was possible for their trust and cooperation situation to get a whole lot worse. 

Since Merrin does not in fact have any idea what could have motivated Estha to say that, her initial reflexive reaction is that he's trying to be infuriating on purpose. (Because he thinks that maybe if he makes himself obnoxious enough then she'll decide she doesn't care to keep him out of Hell after all???) 

....Ooooor possibly Merrin is just cranky and this is entirely a her problem and she should avoid making it his problem too. 

"Asmodeus sounds like a terrible -" 'people manager' does not feel like it would be particularly idiomatic in Taldane, what's the actual best translation here for the Baseline concept she means, it's more general than 'executive' which there also weirdly isn't a great direct translation for, just a lot of more specific ones with connotations she doesn't feel like doing linguistic introspection on right this second, "- commander? I guess I can see how being a terrible commander might from the inside feel like everyone who works for you being stupid." 

Was that helpful to say. Probably not. It's hard to focus on that right now but she literally just said that this was really important to her and she would try really hard, and right now this is what trying looks like.

Merrin shrugs. "I understand that you're telling me you can't be helpful toward this particular goal. Is there anything else you wanted to accomplish with this conversation, apart from conveying that you think I'm wasting my time? ...And that I'll have a bad time if I am the same - soul - as your Mariona but with edits, but I'm not going to modify my own values," did that sentence make sense at all?? there were words that felt like the right words but she's not sure if it holds together as a phrase like the Baseline version would, "on the basis of a hypothetical future threat."

And in fact it's weirdly not-hard to ignore the hypothetical future threat, because...it's too hypothetical? Because on the level of intuitiveprediction, she doesn't really expect that she's the same soul as Mariona and Asmodeus already has dibs? She mostly expects that if she dies she'll either cease to exist, as one would normally expect, or end up on ANOTHER planet which will PROBABLY ALSO BE HORRIBLE because apparently most of the larger Reality is horrible. ...It remains that Merrin would try very hard not to change any of her behavior if she were actually scared of Asmodeus yoinking her, but it would probably take more effort, and given that she's kind of fine with remembering to hold a slot in her explicit worldmodel for that being the situation, and not trying all that hard to make her emotions update on it too.

...She's not really feeling scared of anything, right now. Huh. That's neat. Probably at some point her brain will remember to cringe in mortified agony at the possibility that she's not actually any kind of Protagonist who can Do Impossible Things and is completely deluding herself, but right now she can just matter-of-factly look at a problem and consider that it's pretty likely to be impossible and decide to try anyway. To set her motivation system firmly in the world where her actions might matter to an outcome she's invested in, even if on an epistemic level she's tracking that there are only some worlds in which that's true and she might not be in any of them.

Merrin has a lot of practice with that, actually. So much practice. The entire story of how she ended up working at Exception Handling involved fighting with everything she had for a patient whose odds of a positive outcome were initially put at 10%.

Maybe it's not actually any different? She never had trouble with attempting very hard things that were not very likely to work when it was non-magical medicine she was doing. 

it would be really nice if she could solve this problem with medical skills, she's tired of spending nearly all of her time and effort and thought-cycles on things that aren't the one (1) thing she's ever been actually good at that's whining at Reality again and it won't help.