She starts running Detect Desires and Detect Anxieties alongside Detect Thoughts and focuses even more of her attention on trying to follow every detail of Merrin's thought processes.  If what she suspects now is true -

"You sound like you must be a very special and important person in Civilization, then, if you'd be among the first to be told of any such momentous event; somebody who must surely have been deserving of great wealth and high place?"

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

Merrin's feelings are mostly - confusion? She is worried that Albe is somehow fundamentally misunderstanding what dath ilan is like and maybe her explanation missed something?

She's not upset about it, just - trying to figure out where to even start with that. 

"I mean, I get paid for my work? Extra for training scenarios that are at inconvenient times or where I don't get warning in advance or that are just unpleasant or uncomfortable, and I would get a much bigger bonus if a real First Contact event happened, because sealing myself in a city with an open portal to another world would involve some actual danger. Normally it's done by, like, bidding what your cheerful price is for 'being woken up in the middle of the night' and 'a scenario that lasts fifteen hours straight' but I pay someone to do the actual math for me because it's annoying. ...Also I probably still have some passive income from, like, being featured on television, a lot of the training scenarios or Annual Rehearsals I'm in are televised so people can stay up to date and bid on the prediction markets in real time, and then I get to use their expertise as well in decisionmaking." 

Merrin does not actually have the slightest idea how much she earns from the Exception Handling work. She outsourced it when she was nineteen and first had significant work income; she really doesn't prefer to have to do extra math about things that aren't even her area of expertise, and investing her money responsibly is something she's deeply unqualified to do. When she was twenty-one and getting to the point that she was doing high-cheerful-price trainings or scenarios most weeks, she set a cap on what she thought she actually needed for annual living expenses - a generous amount, she thinks, her apartment is really nice and very, very conveniently located in Default - and the rest goes 10% into a long-term-savings-investment and 90% to charities she picked. Then the whole masochism thing happened and it turned out to be really lucrative, so she's - pretty sure she asked her agent not to bother reserving any of the Exception Handling income for living expenses. She does keep all the money from the bids to date her. It feels - more hers, somehow, this isn't something where Civilization is already investing vast resources in training her. And she suspects her boyfriends would feel - weirder about it, less comfortable accepting what was genuinely her happy price - if she was just donating most of it. She does have to do the bidding herself on that because her investment agent is not approved to know the infohazard, so she knows roughly how much she makes annually, though honestly she's, like, over a year behind on actually properly reviewing her budget. Her lifestyle does not leave a lot of free time when the thing she feels like doing is her personal finances. She's slightly embarrassed about it. 

"- I think I don't know how to parse the second thing you're asking. I - have the amount of influence I should have given my actual expertise?" 

(Merrin is not completely unaware that she has what one might term 'fans', that quite a lot of people tune in to watch her televised scenarios. She sees the volume of updates to the prediction markets, after all. Since Exception Handling emergency-response-medicine is just objectively very cool, this isn't surprising, though it's definitely convenient for Merrin personally, getting to have her plans informed by lots and lots of aggregated expertise. She sort of tries not to think about it too much on a day to day basis, though, it makes her self-conscious. Merrin tries to do her own part by watching other people's scenarios during her off-time but she's not actually very good at prediction-market betting and she probably doesn't really pull her weight there.) 

She was expecting Merrin's thoughts to show spikes of fear, horror, anxiety, or possibly particular thoughts glowing with pleasure and happiness, as her thoughts steered around the question of whether she deserved more importance or pay than she had.

What she's actually seeing is thought processes that sound so reasonable that she's finding part of herself questioning whether she's truly looking at a mind-controlled slave.  Or just somebody with INT 16 and WIS 20, who would be among the first called in if a portal was found to Golarion, who in some perfectly normal way thinks of herself as a below-average individual unsuited to most jobs in her society, who gave nearly-all of her income to what she was told was a charity, and just happens to never look or think about the amount of wealth she's supposed to have from her supposed job, and subsists off the proceeds of prostitution from her secret sadist 'boyfriends' - Merrin is apparently a public spectacle, often performing in some form of arena whose details are hard to make out, but definitely with crowds betting on her, and yet her emotional sense of her own place is that of some unimportant functionary -

On a purely intuitive level, her high-powered Detections are telling her that these are totally normal thought processes and maybe that's what mind control just looks like when you somehow do it without any magic and this is the most fascinating and impressive feat of slavemaking that she has ever seen.  Ever heard of.  This is a thinking curious INT 16 WIS 20 grandmaster-level professional slave who has no idea what she is.

Part of her is still not sure that this isn't just actually how dath ilani society works because that is how totally reasonable and uninfluenced Merrin's thought processes look to Detection if you ignore everything about where she ended up.

...how one would go about breaking this person out of her current mental prison - and into a more interesting one, of course - is something where she'd just have absolutely no idea where to start, if she can't use real torture.  It seems very clear that the false world Merrin lives in is going to be complete and consistent; that any simple questions "But what about..." or "Isn't it funny that the end result was..." will be met with totally reasonable answers, followed by suspicions as to why this question is even being asked and totally reasonable reasons for Merrin to stop listening to whoever is talking to her.

"Forgive me if my curiosity is painful," says Albe, "but - I am wondering what accommodations and - even luxuries - you might have had?  I thought, perhaps I should ask now, before you grow to miss them too much."  They couldn't have been literally feeding her slaves-bread, right, that wouldn't make sense for a slave this expensive.

- Detect Desires is now picking up a brief but VERY INTENSE pang of homesickness. Merrin is aware that no longer having her really lovely apartment - she moved into it when the new skyscraper opened in Default, the one which is like five minutes' transit from the airport - it seemed more worth it once she started dating several more people who lived a plane flight away, on top of all the travel she was already doing for work. It's big and spacious and has an entire room dedicated to her collection of Exception Handling-related practice equipment.

Cheliax is poorer than dath ilan, and even if she can contribute to changing that, she probably won't within her lifetime see a city like Default again, let alone have her own beautiful little corner of it. It's not Cheliax's fault that they're less wealthy in material resources than dath ilan, and it would be incredibly rude and awkward, and also - petty, given the scale of everything happening here - to say out loud that she misses her apartment and expects their accommodations to be pretty disappointing. Merrin is absolutely not going to express this, and intends to try her very hardest to be cheerful about whatever quality of apartment they offer her. 

(And forget about her house, she doesn't get to have prediction markets, let alone any of the rest of the vast structure of Civilization, which sort of feels like having one of her arms cut off.)

(Though, who knows, maybe there's some very brilliant wizard here who has a volcano lair, Cheliax certainly leans doompunk enough that she can picture it.) 

Okay but she still has to answer the question. With something that is not awkward and hurtful to say to the people who are clearly trying very hard to make her feel welcome to the point of literally trying to seduce her

Merrin shrugs. "I'm - honestly going to miss airplanes a lot, even though I died in one and you'd think that would give me less enthusiasm for the concept. It'd be different if instant-movement magic worked on me but I think - still not the same, Civilization in dath ilan is just - wealthy enough that it's not even a big deal, to fly halfway around the world for a weekend. I'm...going to miss the conveniences of, of being in a Civilization that I know - I'm excited to find out what you can do with magic, here, but it's still not -" 

Not home. 

(Glimpses, in her thoughts, of vast metal machines taking off from smooth paved roads and soaring across the sky - a view of the ocean sparkling, so far far below - the view from Merrin's floor-to-ceiling window in her apartment that fills the entire wall of her living room, watching the skyscrapers of Default catching the evening light - 

- numbers on a glowing screen, flickering and changing, and comfort and feeling safe because this, this is a process that bends toward the truth and the best available answer and plan of action and Merrin can trust it and can trust all the structures around it, and she can maybe explain to Cheliax how to build skyscrapers but she can't explain the Law that governs Civilization, all she has is fragments half-understood and without any reference or guidance it already sort of feels a little as though what she thought she knew is starting to crumble to dust in her hands -) 

This is actually kind of hard to talk about. 

She shakes her head. "I don't know. I miss prediction markets for decision-making. ...Some of the things I miss like my favorite meals or my best outfits are - probably more replicable, here - but I don't know enough to teach Cheliax how to build the Civilization I know." 

...it's impossible to tell, with thoughts so glancing, were those slave accomodations, or not?  Merrin didn't think they were and the glimpses via Detection suggests that Merrin was hardly being treated as a slave by Cheliax's standards.  By dath ilan's?  It's so hard to tell at this remove.  Merrin was, in theory, much wealthier than anything that she tried to draw in the way of 'living expenses', but what kind of living situation that corresponded to - could Merrin actually have had more wealth than she needed, could it actually have been that -

No!  Merrin thinks of herself as too small of a person for somebody who would have been first called to a portal, for somebody with so many elite sadistic 'boyfriends', who had crowds cheering her and betting on her in some arena.  The Keepers weren't keeping Merrin poor, that would have been a ridiculous and meaningless economy for a slave this important.  They were keeping Merrin weak, unaware of the power she could have garnered for herself and wielded in her own name.  Merrin has no awareness of wealth as anything that can be used for ends besides personal luxuries, she has no thought that wealth foregone is power foregone, and that's why Merrin never tries to use the wealth she thinks she has.  Maybe Merrin does hold vast wealth, legally, there if Merrin ever looks for it, which she never will; the Keepers may not bother with keeping wealth, in a place like dath ilan, so long as they keep power.

Amazing they just wear the name openly like that.

...and now she has to face the agonizing decision between whether to try to matching her own wits against Merrin's makers, to make Merrin realize what was done to her, for Cheliax to offer Merrin everything that was taken from her, in exchange for a damnation she never needs to know is coming.  Or just take advantage of her incredibly convenient brainwashing.

While all this was going on, they've run out the elements to test.  The last element Albe is testing, Ooze, fails to penetrate Merrin's antimagical shield.  It's not surprising, in one sense; in another it is.  Even a Prismatic Sphere has seven vulnerabilities for each of its seven layers.

"All right, there's one more class of tests, which is magic items."  Albe withdraws a wand from the wall - this magic item is not, technically, actually a 'wand', but it looks like one.  "Try pointing this at me and saying," Albe points the wand at herself, "Belial."

A small dart of light, fast as an arrow, pulses out from the wand and apparently vanishes as it touches Albe.

Albe offers the wand to Merrin.

Thinking about what she misses the most - talking about it, talking about how dath ilan works and holds together - was, perhaps, not great for Merrin's current emotional stability. She's - so lonely.  

Lonely, and scared - though even Merrin herself isn't entirely sure what she's afraid of or why, it certainly isn't going to come across clearly to Detect Anxieties - and some other emotion that she can't even begin to name, except that it feels cold and unsteady and murky. 

- also she really needs to focus on what they're doing here. And then make sure she gets answers to her own questions, before some other distraction comes up. 

She accepts the wand. It was clearly harmless to Albe when used on herself, and it's very very likely it will, in Merrin's hand, do nothing, and she's still an amount uneasy about it but - probably the literal worst case is that, if some kind of horrible unintended side effect somehow manages to kill Albe, they can bring her back. Which would presumably be very inconvenient for everyone but it's also vanishingly unlikely, and nonfatal injuries are even less of a problem, and in short it is not actually worth doing more mental risk analysis here. 

"Belial?" Merrin says, carefully imitating the syllables. 

Nothing.

Albe takes the wand back, not holding it like it's particularly dangerous, and feeds it back into the wall.

From the wall Albe draws forth a ring.  She slips it onto her own finger, slips it off again.  "Try putting this on a finger; it's meant to cast a physical protection about you.  It is not impossible that it would fall outside the range of the magical interference, though I rather expect not."

Sure. She tries the ring on. 

She's on her own and this is TERRIBLE. It's one thing to operate on her own that for a training scenario that has a stopping point, at which point there is a debrief and guidance, and it's different if it's just her indefinite future, if and until she can build...whatever she can, whatever shards of Civilization and Law she understands enough to put together from scratch...and even if she can do that it feels like she's lost something, something more nebulous than the obvious parts she can name. 

But Merrin knows how to handle things which are terrible. And one of the ways to handle things which are terrible is that you plan ahead, but you don't try to emotionally carry the weight of the entire future all at once. 

"- How many more magic items to try? I notice I'm feeling impatient to get to the point when I can take out my questions list about Golarion and Cheliax and cover all the things on it that you're not worried will be somehow risky to explain, and - I wouldn't be surprised if the particular questions I ask will help point at questions you should be asking about dath ilan." 

Poor thing!  No one so accustomed to slavery should be without a master, indeed.  She will certainly do whatever she can to help Merrin with that problem.

Albe takes the ring back.  "I'd intended to try a few more things, but I confess, I have a suspicion at this point how those tests will go.  Three such tests are important, though."

"First, I need to very weakly enchant that needle of which I spoke before, and try poking you with it.  Even for an enchantment that doesn't really do anything, that's still a task of a few minutes, and I won't be much for speaking during that."  A needle extrudes from the wall as Albe speaks, along with a small lump of silvery metal.

Sure. Merrin will be very still and quiet and take the opportunity to try to catch up on some processing, because this conversation has been swerving all over the place and covered a lot of ground and she hasn't had a chance at all to start putting it together and propagating the relevant updates. 

Things that have come up. 

- In addition to afterlives, you can bring people back from the dead with magic. Which has the obvious ramifications on things like 'lab safety standards'. 

- Among the differences in protocol, flirting with and attempting to seduce visitors in your dangerous magical research lab is a thing. 

- They apparently do not consider sadism or masochism to be infohazardous at all. Merrin didn't actually get the relative prevalence in the population from Albe, she should ask once Albe is interruptible. 

- Albe...seems to think that Merrin should try the sadism side of things, and it seems that Albe would approve if Merrin ended up enjoying it. Which...implies...that people in Golarion are reasonably likely to be both? 

- She has now explained the steered-by-Tropes space of hypotheses for her arrival here, but not the Romance theory, although that is...maybe actually fine to explain given the abovementioned not being locally considered an infohazard anyway. Merrin is mostly worried that it would escalate the flirting further.

- Their whole categorization system is even weirder than it sounded at a first glance. Albe has (quite reasonable) concerns that if she tries to explain it without sufficient care then Merrin will end up dangerously confused or misled. 

- You can pass messages to gods (unclear how) and gods can send people visions with instructions. 

- Albe...had some reactions to her explaining Governance. Merrin isn't going to go through all of that right now but she noted that Albe seemed particularly curious about Keepers. 

- Albe seems to be under the impression that Merrin could be expected to be wealthy and influential based on her role in Exception Handling? Which, like, on the one hand she is, to an extent - she's definitely wealthier than the median person in dath ilan and she probably also has more total influence, but it's also still true that one very specific subspecialty of Exception Handling is...not that big a deal? There are thousands or tens of thousands of people who are equally skilled and well-known in their own incredibly niche domains, and that's not even counting the people in leadership or secondary-management advisory roles who actually steer the future of Civilization. 

- Albe wants to make sure she doesn't feel too deprived by losing the luxuries and conveniences of home, which is sweet of her but seems pretty hard to accomplish. This feels very awkward to navigate without offending or upsetting anyone. 

- .....Also she has technically been observing some experimental results on the exact limits of her antimagical effect. This manages to be less interesting than almost any of the rest. 

- well, that's a lot of things and Merrin can't really tie it all together without paper to write on. It seems like the most important confusion here is around the axes of categorization. And also gods. And it seems relatively high-priority to learn how Cheliax structures its Governance, because that will tell her something about their level of protection against unintended-consequence unknown failure modes of trying new projects. 

(This is probably all the time Merrin will have to think before Albe is finished with her enchantment.) 

All right, that's one incredibly weak enchantment done on this Needle of Poking.  Has Merrin put her shoe back on since they did Magma testing?

She has not! She's been pretty much just sitting on the floor in the middle of the room this whole time anyway. 

Then Albe shall go and hold Merrin's foot firmly.  "Ready?  This will, of course, actually hurt; I expect your flesh to reject the magic but not the metal."

"- And it'll hurt more if this this is the one exception where the magic does work on me, but not actually cause seriously-inconvenient damage, right?" 

"If it actually works you'll feel a strong additional sensation to go with the poke.  Not enough to damage you further, just enough to be unmistakable when you tell me how it felt, if you feel anything."

"Ready?"

"Noted. I'm ready." 

Merrin is so curious and it's actually slightly disappointing that the magic is almost certainly not going to work on her and she won't get to find out. 

Poke!

(This feels exactly like being jabbed with a needle, according to Merrin's no doubt tremendously finely-honed sense for such things.)

"- I did not feel any additional sensation," Merrin confirms, very calmly. She is trying so hard not to react to this in a way that could be interpreted as further escalation of flirting, not because it's not tempting but she really needs to do some more thinking on her own before she can decide if it's a good idea to let the highly-trusted consultant to Cheliax's Governance seduce her.