Anything he was wearing as a necklace is no longer on him! Merrin carefully removed everything that was removable and that might, like, choke him if it got caught on something, that's just common sense. 

(It's not far away – the interior of Merrin's cave shelter is not huge, and has no interior room divisions. The armor she cut off him is in a pile on the ground, and anything she was able to remove without destroying it is instead laid out on the top of one of her gear boxes. It is very dark, though, the space lit only by a handful of bedtime-mode LED strip lights, and may be hard to spot.) 

And Esta is now right back to noticing the incoherence between taking away his unholy symbol and his armor, versus removing the splints when requested and helping him sit up in bed.  This is a contradictory set of actions if everything Esta thinks he remembers is true.

...But he will risk making a use of a divine focus, even given that Mariona might have been correctly and helpfully and wisely removing it from him, because he needs to ask her some questions in order to get anywhere from here.

Esta bends over further, and touches the bottom of his left foot.

And, for the first time ever, after over a full decade, actually makes use of the emergency backup pentagram he'd had expensively tattooed onto the bottom of that foot, after reaching fourth circle.

Esta does not know why more clerics do not do this.  It seems like such an obvious precaution to him.  Well, except that then your captors will just cut off your foot if they do catch on; but eh, at 4th circle you can afford a Regenerate if you need one.

Tongues.

(Mariona will probably not fail to observe his mouth emitting sounds that are odd even by previous standards, or his fingers doing elaborate things.)

Merrin is KIND OF ALARMED by all the moving-around he's doing! She did not IDENTIFY any spinal damage, or any serious internal bleeding, but he did have the baffling problem when she took his possibly-a-bizarre-medical-device belt, and Merrin is aware that she could have just missed an injury given how exhausted she already was by the time she got him back to the shelter and her diagnostic equipment. 

Anyway, compared to that, saying a weird-sounding word or wiggling his fingers is really not at the top of what's stressing her out. 

She doesn't actually try to stop him, but she is very very obviously hovering with the intent, focused expression of someone preparing to react instantly to an emergency. 

(She's so confused. She's so so so confused. The only reason she's not saying tsi-imbi about it is because she did that, like, a dozen times early on, and of course nothing happened, and it's been months and she is in fact pretty sure - she was more sure before the latest new confusing events, but still pretty sure - that she cannot possibly still be in dath ilan and having an untreated psychotic break that entire time so it would not accomplish anything, and, like, even if Estha is sufficiently with-it to know what she means despite apparently not being able to speak or understand anything ELSE in Baseline, that feels like kind of a lot to put on him right now. Anyway, she's currently firmly in the mode of "doing common-sense reasonable things that are unlikely to cause an enormous disaster if her interpretation of what's happening is completely off", while in the background trying to drag together the confusion observations but not, yet, take decisive actions about any guesses she might have.) 

Esta thinks of the words he remembers Mariona shouting at him earlier -- 'tidal bore' -- and wills himself to speak in that language as he says, in Baseline, "Report."

(As is not, in fact, the exact standard word you'd speak to tell a subordinate in Exception Handling to give you a compressed report; as is the closest analogy for what Esta thinks he's trying to do.)

(It's not particularly idiomatic Baseline for any particular situation, in fact.  Maybe a hospital analogy would be if a doctor walked into an ongoing emergency, and as their first action inside the room, said, "Summarize!")

???????????????????????????????????

Merrin has had six and a half hours of sleep out of the last forty-nine hours and is (mostly accidentally, she's been super distracted) running a serious calorie deficit today. She's...not going to successfully think about Big Important Questions like whether her broader model of Reality is systematically incomplete. So she's not trying, right now, she'll just take at face value that yesterday Estha was having some kind of communication-affecting cognitive dysfunction and now it's somewhat better and she doesn't need a complete accounting of how or why to do the obvious thing and answer a question he asked her. 

(He's not actually in her Exception Handling chain of command, she wouldn't necessarily expect him to use the standard idiom, but he does know she works there, so she's weakly noting that this could be a sign of ongoing disfluency, just less severe than 'unable to speak words in Baseline at all'. None of this fits very well with her pre-existing knowledge base on how recovery from a head injury looks, but that is really not the only thing she's confused about.) 

She can summarize what's been going on, sure, if that's the first thing he needs to feel more in control of the situation. It makes perfect sense to her - and to the blurry thread of Laeirthe-opinions that is just barely managing to exist in her frazzled brain - that it would be, that's a normal human way to feel and also characteristic for Estha specifically.

The report is going to come out very much on automatic, the sort of scripted response she can spit out while 60% of her attention is on monitoring a patient's medical status (or, in this case, it's more because only 40% of her cognition is online at all) and is therefore not particularly adjusted for any of her enormous confusions. 

"I've been here for four months by my count." Since she doesn't know if there's, like, ???relativistic time dilation??? involved, or whether it's been the same interval in dath ilan. "It appears to be an exoplanet orbiting a hotter more distant star - still habitable zone, obviously, liquid oceans - with a 64-hour planetary day and a closer, more massive moon closer moon causing larger tidal amplitude." Normally she would take for granted that Estha could obviously infer 'larger tidal amplitude' from facts about the moon, but she's modeling him as pretty impaired. "Native life present, I infer earlier in its history, some edible and non-toxic but likely not providing adequate nutrition." 

There, that's the basic backstory. Now for the recent-event summary.

"Yesterday afternoon - about 25 hours ago now, forty percent of a planetary day - I saw you coming out of the cave. By the way that cave has radon gas, but I didn't detect any radiation signature on you and haven't observed any symptoms so I infer your exposure was low. I tried to warn you about the tidal bore, wasn't in time. Went in after you, pulled you out 1500 meters upstream, you were in respiratory arrest but still had a pulse, I got you breathing and transported you back here and provided medical care. We're a little before midnight, local time."

Pause.

"How are you feeling?" 

There are SO MANY additional questions here, starting with why she is reporting HOW THE TIDES WORK instead of MANY things you'd think Esta would obviously want to know more -- four months, what -- 

And what sort of bizarre language is this -- stupid question, it's a Dark Tapestry language spoken by things that think half in numbers and have words for varieties of planets and stars like wizards have words for their Spellcraft --

But Mariona is asking a question that perhaps makes sense for a healer to ask, and he will abide its lack of courtesy for all else that is happening.  "I am narrowly recovered as to --"

And then Esta stops, because this language has no word for the sort of vitality that is healed by Cure spells, as distinguished from ability damage or drain, or fatigue or exhaustion, or negative levels, or insanity.

"...simple... health."

Can he ask why she took away his divine focus?  Or if she thinks it's unsafe for him to cast with one?

No.

Because the language they're speaking has no word for an unholy symbol.

And it has no word that means to cast a spell.

From Merrin's perspective, that is a fairly bizarre way to answer the question! She would normally expect, like, a list of symptoms, for her to use her greater medtech expertise to put together with all the additional information she has from her monitoring and make updates about his overall status? Pain (by location and roughly-quantified severity), weakness, subjective sense of deficits, that sort of thing. Instead he's...making a confident high-level claim about how recovered he is, with a bizarre un-idiomatic phrasing, and hesitating in the middle like he was having trouble remembering the words to finish his sentence. 

She's concerned! Just going off the content of what he said, Estha seems pretty not-okay! 

...He doesn't look sick, is the thing. Merrin has a really, really finely-honed intuition for that, by now, and her finely-honed intuition is cheerfully informing her that he looks great. Like, relatively speaking, her intuition doesn't think she should take him out on a strenuous hike or anything, but he looks like a patient who does not even slightly need intensive-care-resource-level monitoring or attention, and in fact could probably complete the rest of his recovery at home. 

Merrin is not just going to take her gut-level intuition at face value, obviously. But it's loud and it's jarring and she's painfully confused. 

(Imaginary Laeirthe from her fanfiction is...trying to raise a thought to her attention, wow that does not normally happen that unwilled, she wasn't trying for a Laeirthe-input and normally she has to try...the incomplete wordless mental motion is something like PAY! MORE! ATTENTION! Which would be great advice, and all, except for how Merrin does not really have any more attention available right now.) 

It won't help to look stressed or alarmed. It won't help to be stressed or alarmed, in fact, and Merrin is throwing all of her years of hard-won skills and mental techniques at not being. 

"Estha," she says, slowly and carefully, "do you - remember - what happened to me four months ago? ...Might've been a different time interval for you, but - after the last time you saw me?" 

Something is wrongwrongwrong. Merrin isn't sure if the problem is within her boyfriend's brain or, like, with Reality more broadly, but something is wrong, and "does Estha remember the ALMOST MAXIMALLY MEMORABLE event of his masochist girlfriend's True Death in a plane crash" is a cognitive check that she should perhaps have thought to ask him first. 

"Four months ago, according to my own understanding of temporal processes, I showed up at your... home... for a surprise visit involving an amusing amount of pain."

"Two days ago, according to my own understanding of temporal processes, you were about your ordinary work so far as I know."

"Only if it is not cognitohazardous for you to think of it or speak of it, do you remember the causalpathway that led to your arrival here?"

This language has a disturbingly short word for describing Dark Tapestry things you should not try to remember, but that also figures.

.......

When did she - yeah, okay, that did happen, well, it was eight months ago for her - now is really not the time to dwell on how much she's missed him or exactly how long it's been since her life involved ANY SADIST BOYFRIENDS, is it - 

(It will probably be apparent to Esta that Merrin's reaction to the mentioned "visit" is a burst of affection-toward-him and rapidly-suppressed longing.) 

She didn't, uh, previously think that it was cognitohazardous for her to think about what happened to her? Just, like, if this was in fact a phenomenon known to others in dath ilan, the whole "respawning on exoplanets after True Death" thing, then there was presumably a reason it wasn't general knowledge... 

"There was a plane crash," she says, carefully. "In circumstances where I expected no one on the plane to be successfully cryopreserved. I very briefly experienced the start of a lethal ground impact, I think, I guess I can't really say I 'experienced' 'dying' - and then there was a discontinuity, and then I woke up on this planet. With exactly the set of Exception Handling gear boxes that I'd brought on the flight, though they weren't directly beside me at the moment of the crash." 

A pause. "....I don't know if this part is - related to any existing knowledge or theory generally considered cognitohazardous? But it felt weirdly like...a situation where the challenge level was optimized to be just barely survivable for me, specifically? To an extent I would not expect to happen by chance."

Merrin somewhat-markedly-for-Baseline isn't putting numbers on, like, her assigned likelihood to this happening by chance, because she has enough uncertainty on deeper levels to have no idea how to assign priors there and it feels unusually much like making-numbers-up. And also she's really, really tired, and numbers are harder for her than for normal people at the best of times. 

"As you see it, does that story makecompletesense?"  Esta has the feeling that 'makecompletesense' means something way more specific than he even knows how to say in words, but whatever, it also feels like vaguely the right thing to mean.  "Is there a retrospectivelyobviousaccount of why a -- plane crash -- would send you here, four months ahead of when I arrived myself?  With your particular -- gear -- that was not even adorning you at the time?"

(Adorning her???? What is with Estha’s vocabulary choices, this is the weirdest word-finding-disfluency that Merrin has ever observed a patient having. She is seized by a brief and very silly mental image of herself, like, wearing all of the IV and oxygen tubing piled up around her neck.)

“No!” Merrin would really have thought that would be obvious! “But I am below-median-thinkoomph, right, I think it’s not very surprising that I couldn’t hypothesize and test a new model of aspects of Reality I have no training for, on my own.”

The claim that Merrin is simply and matter-of-factly making doesn’t quite feel like it should translate to “lower Cunning than most people”, but it feels like it’s not terribly far off from that claim? (The language does not seem to have a vocabulary for the standard three mental abilities that Esta is familiar with, at least not in exactly three categories for Cunning, Wisdom, and Splendor.) 

"We are suffering from fabricated, stolen, or adjusted memories.  Some combination of those two, applying to me, to you, or to both of us, sufficient-to-account-for-discrepancy.  One day ago as I remember it, you and I, in the same place, came into simultaneous contact with an entity I'm trying not to think about in detail but certainly powerful enough to transport us here and modify our minds.  I would not call it fullyunderstood but it is -- fundamentally within retrospectiveprediction if not advanceexactprediction.  As my understanding makes more retrospectivesense than yours, I therefore defeasiblysuspect that your mind has been affected more than my own, which is also what would have been advancepredicted based on our respective degrees of susceptibility to -- mind control."

What a strange language.  It is so much more Lawful than Esta would have suspected of the Dark Tapestry.  It is expressing thoughts more precise than Esta himself ever previously had words for, shades of intuitive meaning that Taldane would not force him to distinguish and put into explicit words.  Even Infernal as Esta knows it would not distinguish those words, and it is suddenly obvious that this is because Hell's intervention budget cannot afford to teach mortal Asmodeans real Infernal.  Aspexia Rugatonn would fucking love this language, if anyone could safely strip all the Dark Tapestryness out of it...

...or Esta once previously knew all those words and meanings, and has forgotten them as thoroughly as Mariona has forgotten words about magic.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah????!!!!!!

All of that is, like, fair? Uh, accounting for the part where it's completely absurd, but the situation was already absurd, having a theory for how it happened that is ALSO absurd is kind of expected with the territory. 

Merrin was fully aware that the sequence of events she observed does not really make sense. She's been tracking for the last four months that she was probably missing some key piece that would let her form a hypothesis of what the fuck. It's not surprising that Estha would, potentially, have a knowledge base broader than her on, like, higher-level models of Reality than the extremely concrete human-biology knowledge base she's specialized in. 

...Except that the phrase he grabbed, there, "mind control", is...not, actually, the phrase someone would use for a thing in the same conceptual bucket as Keeper talk-control but presumably considered more infohazardous since Merrin was not previously cleared to know about it. It's, instead, a phrase that Merrin has only encountered in fictional worldbuilding – a subtype of mentalisticmagic, itself a subtype of conceptualmagic.

(It happens to exist in the fictional setting that the original Laeirthe character was taken from.) 

Um. 

Like, taking that for granted it is not actually shocking that Estha is hypothesizing he would be harder to affect than her. That makes perfect sense if one is accepting the premise!

Just. 

What. 

Also: Merrin is at all tracking that, whether or not she should be putting any weight on her interpretation of observations she's making, it does seem to her that Estha is more impaired than her? Both right now, and notably also from the moment he arrived? 

Like, sure, he's not an Exception Handling endurance specialist, but he should have been able to recognize an intertidal zone when he saw one, and not need a warning to get out of it? Okay, fine, maybe that part was just the heatstroke and hypoxia, or - maybe Merrin is doing a little bit of the thing she does where she assumes that people who are smarter than her will just simply definitely know more things than her even though that is not how specialization works, but - something about the entire story she's telling herself isn't quite holding together -

She's confused. 

She wants to ask what actually happened, from his own perspective, that he thinks was edited out of her memory (aaaaah????!!!!).

Merrin knows better than to do that, when he just told her very clearly it was cognitohazardous. 

(The imaginary voice of Laeirthe is trying to flag some kind of objection to that but Merrin is not listening, right now. Merrin is, uh, slightly wondering if having the experience of "the imaginary fictional character from her fanfiction is now trying to talk in her head without her intending that" is something that should be taken as evidence that her mind is in fact messed up.) 

"Okay," she says. "...I'm now unsure to what extent I should be trusting my memories after the event I believed I experienced, that you think didn't happen, but - I do have memories of staying alive on this planet for four months - uh, after the point of my memory of the plane crash, I currently have memories of eight months elapsing since your visit and it seems like you only remember four months? - and forming an understanding of our constraints. ...I'm also flagging that I'm very confused about a lot of medical observations I made over the course of rescuing you, and I - don't know what I'm missing - so it's possible that my medical training knowledge base is scrambled and you should be sanity-checking everything I say or do on that topic."  

Wow. That would be upsetting. That would be really really upsetting!!!!! Though, like, surely there's a cap on how confused she can be, she did manage to get him out of the river alive and stuff...

Her medical knowledge has not been scrambled, it has been replaced by something out of the Dark Tapestry.

Alternatively, Esta's own memories about the nature and purpose and principles of... all the noisy flashy things in this healer's tent... were eliminated.

Either way, it makes sense of why Esta's holy symbol is missing.  Because if he saw anything looking as inscrutable as all those flashy things, attached to an injured Mariona, he would remove them.

Esta will give her a half-smile, exaggerated as he has noticed all of Mariona's facial expressions to now be exaggerated.  "Be assured that I am responsibility-acceptingly tracking that."

"You look like you did not get enough sleep before being interrupted.  I certainly have more questions but they can wait until you are --" no longer suffering from the Fatigued condition "-- rested."

And it will give him some much-needed time to think, as well.

He's really, really not wrong. Merrin can tell when she's pushed herself well past her limits and is paying for staying-awake-longer with increasing impairment; having a better sense for that and for navigating the tradeoffs there is a lot of what her endurance training was about. There are times when a 4.5 hour nap would be enough to get her more or less functional again for another block of work, but this is not one of those times, and right now she's still drowning in sleep inertia and actually feels a lot more tired than she did before she lay down. 

Estha does not look sick. Merrin....is currently inclined to go with the cluster-of-observations that include that plus his own self-report plus all the various "wow it's really lucky he wasn't worse off from that" confusions earlier, and tentatively consider that the cluster-of-medical-knowledge that makes all of this seem really surprising is the part that got scrambled. 

...That conclusion miiiight be involving some degree of motivated cognition because she really, really wants getting some sleep to be the correct decision, rather than the correct decision being to push through her exhaustion even longer because, in the event of an Estha-deterioration, an impaired Merrin is still more useful than a Merrin who isn't even conscious at the time? And also some degree of motivation cognition around not wanting to argue with Estha about it? 

Buuuuuuut the fact that Merrin cannot tell introspectively, even once she's attending to it, how much of her conclusion is motivated cognition, does not bode well for her functionality right now. 

"Okay," she says. "...It's going be really cold later, the day and night temperatures are extreme and I can't afford overnight heating or it'll get dangerously hot in the daytime. Um, if you're recovered enough that it won't hurt you, we could cuddle, and stay warmer? I'd like to, because I really missed you," and also she gave him the good sleeping bag and is relegated to a pile of blankets that will be much less cozy once it's -10° C in here, but that's not really the reason she's making the bid, "but conditional on your preference being neutral-to-positive," she finishes. 

The latter phrase is idiomatic in Baseline. The sentiment would, of course, be a spectacularly bizarre and uncharacteristic one for Mariona, or anyone from Cheliax, to express. 

No expression shows on Esta's face as he remembers that thing which very famously happened to Dou-Bral, after Dou-Bral wandered too far out among the stars, and became the worst possible abject lesson to every other god.

Is Mariona now Chaotic Good.

Esta has not been granted a Break Enchantment this day, though he had requested two such of Asmodeus.

Esta really really hopes this is because it is deemed important that he observe and learn more about this phenomenon before unmaking it, and not because a Break Enchantment will predictably not help.

"I expect I will want to stand up some and move around, before it becomes so cold that we must huddle together for warmth.  Apart from that, it seems a terribly logical suggestion."

Esta was given an Endure Elements and an Extended Planetary Adaptation, and they may need to use both of those in the hot phase of the day -- though he has no idea how Mariona has been surviving up until now.  Maybe both are for him, in the hot phase of this planet's very long day; Esta did not miss the part about 64 hours.

Also, Esta has met Chaotic Good people before.  Sometimes even under circumstances where he isn't allowed to torture them to death before Maledicting them!

UM he wants to do WHAT NOW. 

"......You should override my advice if you're confident that you own understanding conflicts with it and that walking is - safe right now," she says, "but I do want to note that you broke both your legs. Pretty badly. I spent, like, two hours getting all the bone fragments lined up so I could splint them properly and I'll be really sad if you mess them up again." 

(She's being somewhat more imprecise in her speech than she would normally aim for, which Merrin's Estha would recognize as the thing that happens when a Merrin is really extremely tired and also on the downswing from a stressful situation and starting to actually relax.) 

Are there any restraints that would prevent Esta from standing up?