Three sentences into Estha's infodump, it occurs to Merrin that she should probably, like, be taking notes? Fortunately she has her electronic screen out already for data entry, since when Estha interrupted she was doing tidal math, and so she can open a new file and start notetaking in Baseline - and also audio-record, that should be at all useful later for vocabulary retention - without having to interrupt. 

Lich: ...various problems, she can see that, including - she thinks, from linguistic introspection - ones that Estha didn't bother to mention, Merrin can't get exact specifics off Share Language but she gets a feeling that the process involves doing something horrible in itself. 

Weird disturbing fantasy-setting version of involuntary cryo? Okay, sure, why not, that might as well exist. ....Different weird disturbing version of same? Yeah, okay. 

…Kind of confusing to claim that Reality is sufficiently obsessed with souls ending up in the assigned locations to track one down on a distant planet, and also that Pharasma allows spells to screw around with where souls end up? …Also, wow, Merrin can see why the Dark Tapestry is considered so alarming and cognitohazardous, given the “Zon-Kuthon” thing. Disturbing. She writes it down even though it’s not really directly about keeping souls out of Hell. 

And then Estha gets to the part about SENDING AN ENTIRE RANDOM FAMILY TO THE EVEN WORSE TORTURE LIFE, and Merrin is having kind of a hard time maintaining her calm expression. She keeps taking notes, as verbatim as she can, but she is perhaps not processing or questioning the part about executives trying to do Good deeds to stay out of Hell (and according-to-Estha usually failing, but Merrin can at least think to question that.) 

What do you even SAY to that. That's so incredibly upsetting. Though a surprisingly small proportion of Merrin's feelings are being mad at alternate-Estha who actually did that thing, and more - 

...they would have tried to make Mariona do that...

"I think," she says, slowly, crisply, "that I can understand, better, why you didn't find your version of me very ambitious. If that's what you get, for being good at your job." 

"Oh, you're not told about it in advance.  But I suppose Mariona would have been aware that getting better at her job would mean her doing more Evil of one sort or another.  I had never guessed that it could be her obstacle.  Detect Thoughts would have informed the Church and myself if she had dared to believe such a thing about herself, and she did not."

"Do you believe that you and she are literally the same person, but -- brought into, occurring within, different countries?  I wonder if Estha ended up as any less of a Lawful Good extremist, then, given that I did not halt myself from rising under Cheliax.  -- In Taldane the name is Esta."

Merrin had been pretty close to just straight-up declaring to Estha that she can't do this, she needs to nope out, it will be bad for their working relationship if she tries to continue having a conversation that involves finding out in more detail about horrifying things that he, specifically, has done. 

- Esta, apparently, huh having the Share Language up is letting her distinguish the phoneme difference more clearly than she suspects she would be able to otherwise, she's probably going to sound so weird speaking Esta's various languages once it wears off - 

His answer is less obnoxious than she was expecting, though? And she's not, actually, angry with him exactly. 

"...That's my current highest likelihood theory." Explaining the concept of fanfiction alternate universes in Taldane sounds agonizing and Infernal is probably worse. "I think Estha in dath ilan was...probably closer to Lawful Neutral if you just consider his internal motivation? I think he - provided a lot of value to Civilization, if that counts as Good - but he was maybe less motivated by that directly than I am, and more motivated by the fact that providing value to Civilization is something that people find impressive - and that you get paid a lot of money for and you can spend money on fun things." Such as masochists. Wow she misses the non-Evil version of her boyfriend so much. "I was weirdly bad at being motivated by that, for my culture." 

Pause. 

"- What did Mariona believe about herself? I have - theories - about what parts of me could be pushed in what directions to get me to work for Asmodeus, and I'm curious if they're at all right." 

"That she was a worthless disgusting worm, not only in Asmodeus's sight but also on a more mortal level, and that she ought to be grateful to the Church and Cheliax and Asmodeus for making good use of her.  Reality was slowly introducing her to the concept that other mortals were even worse, but she was slower to accept that than a priestess of Asmodeus should have been."

"I don't actually see the connection from that to -- an aversion against Evil.  To me, it seems far more related to the aversion to specialness that the you in dath ilan shared just the same."

Oh no that's so sad.

It makes sense! It's obviously one way she could square her entire...her...with the entire...that...while being MINDREAD ALL THE TIME wow that would really not do her social anxiety any good would it. 

"...And that's a - permitted thought?" she guesses. "That everyone is a disgusting worm to Asmodeus? ...I see it. I mean, I would hate myself if I was hurting people, even if I was choosing to do it because the alternative was unthinkable and that felt like not having a choice. I had enough trouble not feeling unreasonably bad about myself for not doing as well at saving people's lives as I felt like I should have. And if you were mindreading her then I think she would have to learn to - never even have that thought all the way - and redirect it to the permitted one. - you could do that to me, if you had me at age eight. I don't like that that's true but I think it is, I was really bad at - remembering what I wanted for my own reasons - if it felt like I was supposed to be a certain way to please my teachers." 

Shrug. "It sounds like your Mariona did have wanting to save people's lives, given how we're apparently in agreement on Stabilize being the best spell." 

"If that were true, you'd be even happier when you had a Cure Moderate to hand.  The fun of Stabilize is that, after using it, you are then forced to practice nonmagical medicine to patch up the patient.  You like the process of medicine, not the result of saving lives."

"Mariona was able to admit that about herself, as a result of my using a domain ability on her that surfaces dark and fascinating temptations.  Which I'd be happy to use on you too if --"

"Nevermind."

Huh, is that actually— well, Merrin does like sims, so apparently she does enjoy the process of doing medicine even if it’s not actually saving an actual person’s life, though it feels relevant and important that the extra deliberate practice will at some point feed into situations where she’s helping an actual patient.

And...yeah, okay, she would feel a bit conflictedly weird about using a healing spell that took seconds to replace the entire process. It's incredible for it to exist, obviously, but she likes the process. She likes that medtech work requires a complex and intricate set of skills and good judgement, that she has to model in detail what's wrong and what to do about it, and she would, in fact, probably miss that, if she could never justify spending time on the process and using those skills because she had spells that took less than ten seconds and didn't care if she had diagnosed what exactly was wrong.

And she does kind of wish for interesting medical emergencies to happen in her life, in a slightly complicated way where when they’re happening it’s stressful and tiring and it’s just that it’s also when she feels - most alive, most like she’s bringing all of herself to bear - and she craves that, and it doesn’t hurt that she is very good at it and it's quite normal to enjoy the feeling of executing a skill with mastery. And, like, it seems like most of the rest of Mariona's life must be pretty unrewarding, so "doing non-magical medicine" might be the only interaction with other humans she ever gets to have that doesn't suck. 

...Limited-spell-slot healing would also absolutely give her anxiety. Merrin gets such anxiety about limited-resource-allocation sims. She hates it when she's limited on a factor that she can't mitigate by just, like, trying harder and working longer and doing more annoying tedious manual steps. 

"Well, was she any good at it?" Merrin says. "Did she save lives, compared to if she'd never invested in the skill and just used her spells until they ran out?" 

"Oh, most certainly.  The foremost reason I was able to defend keeping Mariona on as a Worldwound fortress commandant, despite her being initially underleveled for it by circles, was that her casualties were low and her expenses well-controlled.  Similarly, she had the bright idea of carrying out her duties to torture her subordinates for failure by denying magical healing to them, and performing painful surgeries on them instead.  And I expect that by growing her skills in that way, her fort's total casualties ended up even lower over time, at the cost of a little screaming."

"I do wonder what a Lawful Goodie would say of that, and if they'd tell her to stop.  It has never before occurred to me to ask.  I imagine that if I were an impostor trying to pass as a paladin, I would say that Mariona was allowed to do whatever produced the fewest total casualties, but she was not allowed to enjoy it.  I am not sure what I'd say if I had to pass as a smart paladin, though.  I've never met one."

That doesn't even sound fun!!! That sounds miserable!!! Does the doomworld doomplanet not even have anesthesia– ...wow, they might not, if they're lower-tech than dath ilan to begin with and additionally in an equilibrium where non-magical medicine is less advanced than the overall tech level would predict because the existence of magic healing makes it less valuable as an area of research? 

...If Exception Handling had ever given her a sim where she had to perform painful surgery on patients without anesthetic because of a resource constraint, Merrin...could have done that? Honestly, probably more than half of the aaaaaaaaaa she imagines about it is that it would feel like doing medicine badly, since part of her conception of what it even means to do her job well is that you keep your patient comfortable. If it instead felt like an obvious reasonable prioritization, then...it might bother her quite a lot less? 

It would definitely bother her enormously less than outright torturing people who weren't already injured and in need of medical care! What the flaming toilet paper! 

"Well," Merrin says, "I think I'm kind of proud of her for finding the one thing that would keep her Evil manager happy with her and also have the actual result of fixing people's injuries and conserving healing magic resources for emergencies. I can definitely see why that might be fun in comparison to the rest of her horribly depressing life." 

"It's in fact a grimmer outlook on Mariona than I'd previously held."

"-- you understand that if the two of you are different people in truth, and she survived the Outer God incident herself -- or also if it killed her, for that matter -- then Mariona is also destined for, or is already in, Hell.  Not enjoying your job does not alter Pharasma's judgment of it."

"I figured, yeah." 

It's probably one of the many enormously upsetting aspects of the situation that Merrin has not even begun to process, yet. For now her mind is kind of bouncing off it, and it somehow feels like less of a big deal than the TRILLIONS OF OTHER PEOPLE already in Hell - which, valid - but also somehow less salient as a harm to the other version of her than the process that pushed her toward doing Evil things that hurt people, which is absurd on some level but now does not seem like the right time for Merrin to be arguing with her brain about exactly how to allocate all of her upsetness.

“- I admit I’m not sure what you hope to accomplish by bringing it up yet again,” she says. “Are you thinking that if you remind me enough about all the reasons to be mad at you, I’ll give up on the silly idea of caring whether you go to Hell?”

"I suppose that part of me is viscerally angry at your idea that you think you can dance into this situation and figure out how to extract 6th-circle clerics of Asmodeus from Hell.  If that's possible and you can figure it out, knowing as little as you do, it would mean that me and everyone like me was stupid for letting it happen to us.  But I have been running Cultural Adaptation (dath ilan) for long enough that, if that were true, I'd want to know it.  I am just also interested, I suppose, in watching your feelings be hurt about it when you fail after saying and implying what you did.  Either one works for me, really."

"Hell has good reason for telling us that we'll be punished for trying to think of a way out -- namely, the certainty that if idiot mortal worms go on churning their minds in the motion they conceive to be 'thinking', they'll eventually come up with some complicated stratagem that fools themselves but not reality, their wandering thoughts seeking out those places where they are ignorant and confused and compounding those into a hope of escape they've selected to to fool themselves.  But that doesn't mean it would be theologically correct for me to serve Asmodeus if He had no threats to hold over me.  It would be stupid on Asmodeanism's own terms."

Merrin is going to translate that, tentatively with high mental uncertainty bars, as ‘Esta is scared and hurting and feeling out of control of the situation, and reacting to it by trying to feel more in control, specifically by being mean to Merrin in ways that upset her.’ This is a pretty appallingly immature dynamic for anyone over the age of six to slip into - honestly, even having to bow out of a conversation because you caught yourself wanting to upset your conversation partner on purpose is an embarrassing degree of dysregulation and yeah that's probably part of why Merrin is so reluctant to nope out of this conversation...

...It's inconvenient that the reframe does not actually stop it from working. It feels like it should! But apparently that would require Level 5000 Emotional Maturity and Merrin is only Level 4000 or something and so, in fact, she is upset and bothered by Esta boldly stating that he would ??enjoy seeing her be upset about failing to rescue him from Hell??, as though Merrin being upset would in any way be one of the top 100 most important aspects of the situation, and the fact that she's additionally upset on his behalf is making the conversation more rather than less painful. 

- it would bother her a whole lot less if she were framing it as a Professional Mode Merrin interaction with a patient, as opposed to the thing she's doing right now, which is closer to Professional Mode Merrin with a coworker. But for some reason her mind is reluctant and grumpy about doing that reframe? That's interesting. It feels - defensive, protective - on some level she really doesn't want to be using that social script with him, and her brain is not immediately feeling like volunteering a reason why not. Hmm. Note to self to think about that, too, like everything else it'll be about a thousand times easier to think about when he's not RIGHT THERE STARING AT HER. 

Merrin does not want to argue with Esta about dath ilan's belief that obviously it's possible for humans to iterate toward thinking in Reality-tracking ways. She doesn't really want to argue with him about how in her culture, learning that you were being stupid and making a mistake is obviously good news because it means you have the opportunity to stop. 

"Noted," she says. "- I don't actually think this conversation currently looks time-sensitive enough on my end that I want to continue it right now, rather than using my remaining Share Language time to record vocabulary for later. I'm upset about Hell and I do not have infinite emotional maturity about that, and I'm going to have a lot more capacity for dealing with you - repeatedly reminding me that you're trying to be Evil on purpose - once I've had a day to absorb it and make all of my emotional updates. I'm pretty confident I won't stop wanting to keep you out of Hell regardless of how unpleasant you are to be around, because liking you as a person is not why I care about that, but it's not great for our working relationship and regardless of what my other plans include, we are still stuck living in the same cave. What I'd really like is to be left alone for a bit. - honestly I had felt pretty confident in my prediction that you would want to be left alone, and that seems to not be true. If you do still prefer not being alone right now I don't mind talking, just, I would like it if you can stick to topics that don't," make the imaginary Kalorm in her head give her intrusive thoughts about how entertaining it would be to punch him in the face, "upset me." 

She's mostly expecting that Esta will think it's amusing that she thinks he would care about what she would like, and will somehow take it as an opening to be even more socially unpleasant, but she figured she might as well try the polite emotionally mature route first. If he doubles down hard enough on the being-obnoxious strategy, Merrin can just try to put on her armor and leave, and if he escalates to physically stopping her, well, she'll figure out what to do at that point if it comes to it, and whether that happens would also be rather useful information about the prospects for their working relationship, since Merrin demonstrably cannot just avoid all conflicts by being high-agreeableness at him, and being able to tell someone "no" is, in fact, a pretty critically loadbearing element of being able to work with them on anything, according to dath ilan. 

(In almost any other situation, Merrin would be wrestling with enormous quantities of pre-emptive social anxiety while imagining any of those agonizing mortifying interactions. Right now she's still on the other side of that, and really the least important element of any of this is whether Merrin finds it awkward.) 

Merrin's prediction that Esta will (load from required responses that he) consider her distress amusing, would be accurate if Esta were treating with Merrin on a superior and adversarial basis, which Esta would only do if he could obtain more of what he wants from Merrin by treating her that way.  With the headband on he does have WIS 22, and that is sufficient to notice when being Stupid Evil will fail to advance his career goals, on account of himself already having been fired and not having a career.  He didn't put any Bestow Curses or Conditional Curses or Geases on Merrin when he had the chance; and spent weeks interacting in a grotesquely Lawful Good / Lawful Neutral context, in a way that increasingly seems like a horrifying and unfixable mistake on his own part.  But he has already made that mistake, and the upshot is that he would have quite a hard time forcing Merrin to do anything useful if she didn't allow herself to be forced.  For Merrin to do useful work requires her being allowed to put on her exosuit at some point, and Esta now does not have means of surviving an attack by her thus armored.

Similarly +4 Splendor is sufficient for Esta to notice himself being one-upped by Merrin being deliberately more professional at him than he is being, and her being overtly concerned about his welfare in a way that you could read as Lawful Good, but also the way a Lawful Good paladin condescends to an unruly peasant; laced with the Lawful Good version of warnings that the part of her concern for him that isn't pure Goodness is being put at risk by his behavior.

...It wouldn't be surprising if Esta's professionalism has in fact been shaken by, you know, the destruction of his profession.

It's increasingly unclear that Esta has any reasons to be doing anything.  But absent any reasons to do anything, he'll say,

"I've made my point and you've made yours.  Use your solitude productively, then."

And turn to leave the room.