Albe inspects the needle and nods.  "The enchantment is intact, at least."

"Second test.  Try to bend this needle, with your bare hands."  She offers the needle to Merrin.  It definitely looks thin enough to bend.

"....Sure?" Merrin tries bending the needle. "Is the same enchantment supposed to make it stronger and also cause the sensation that I did not get to experience?" 

(The needle remains unbent.)

"Magic items of almost any kind are much less fragile than their mundane counterparts; infusing them with the essence drawn from 'spellsilver' that makes a material magically conductive also strengthens that material."

"Try willing the needle to bend, or the enchantment on it to shatter, as you try to bend it."

"Huh, so the aspect that makes it harder to bend is - not the enchantment itself, but the fact that the material includes 'spellsilver' that the enchantment can be put on at all?" 

Merrin isn't really sure what mental motion she's supposed to be trying here, but she gives it a go, starting with willing the needle to bend and trying the second thing if that doesn't work. 

(Needle remains unbent.)

"It doesn't need to include spellsilver directly, but there's a movable essence in spellsilver of - magic, magical conductivity - I have the strangest feeling that this language would be more apt to express the concept here if we of Golarion knew what it was, I can feel the language trying to draw specifics from me that I don't have.  It's somewhat better to infuse the spellsilver directly, than to draw the essence from it, for then you may be able to refine some of the spellsilver back out again later.  In this case I was in a hurry and had no time for forging.  It doesn't become hardened right away, upon the essence transferring, but almost any preliminary step of enchantment is enough to produce the resilience."

Albe takes back the needle.  "The enchantment on it looks unbroken as well.  Well, it makes you less powerful than you might have been, but at least you won't shatter expensive magical items just by touching them."

Wow, that's fascinating. Without knowing more details of the translation magic, Merrin isn't sure if Baseline is just generically better for expressing complex concepts and physical-law-type relationships, or if there are actual Baseline words for some of the components here, like 'spellsilver' whatever that is. If it's a metal in the normal periodic table then Baseline would of course have a word for it - is there a metal out there somewhere that would conduct magic except that dath ilan has never been able to test that before? 

"Right, I just - suppress them instead? Temporarily?" 

"You don't suppress enchantments so much as they're unable to act on you.  I think even if we poked the needle through you, we'd be unable to bend it while it was inside you."

Albe then makes a rather expressive unhappy face.  "Our last test about magic items, unfortunately, is going to be rather unpleasant for me... but there is information that can be quickly gained thereby, and it is information that seems important.  Bide while I cast some supportive spells on myself."

Albe touches herself on the chest, waits six seconds, touches her chest again, waits six seconds, touches her chest again.

Huh. That's...a very polite and convenient way for her anti-magical effect to work? Not for her, necessarily, it still won't let any magic work on her, but in terms of not damaging anyone else's magical items. That's - evidence of something, probably, about the goals of whatever entity caused this to happen. She's not sure...what. 

She doesn't object to Albe going with the unpleasant-for-her test. Albe is much better placed to judge if it's worth it for the information gained. 

"Would you mind if I just performed this test first, it should be quick, and explained it afterwards?  I will feel better about doing it that way."  Not to mention safer.

Merrin isn't delighted about that but she, at this point, does have a reasonable balance of evidence that Albe is calibrated about danger to herself, and that there's some actual countervailing consideration for why discussing it first might be worse than risking the scenario where Albe needs help and Merrin has no idea what's going on. 

"I am going to want it explained after," she says, but nods. 

She orders the watching Security to fail his Will save, and turns her Detection on him.

He doesn't have any idea what she's about to do, is wondering about that.  Good.  This would be an amazingly good time to assassinate her, otherwise.

She doesn't cast additional protections on herself, that might give away, to anyone watching, how much of a good time this might be to attack.  Mostly, the way she can be safe is by doing this all in less than six seconds.

She has put up Cunning, Wisdom, Splendour, she's made it hurt as little as it possibly can.  Cheliax does not have that many major artifacts lying around in the first place, divine or otherwise, and the others would be too dangerous or revealing to test against Merrin -

With a convulsive sort of motion, Albe pulls off the fancy headgear she's wearing, puts it on Merrin's head for a second or two, and then pulls it off and drops it back onto her own head.

(The fancy headgear, in the couple of seconds it's on Merrin's head, feels substantially weightier than appearances would suggest.)

(That's all.)

Merrin holds perfectly still, and waits until the fancy headgear is solidly back on Albe's head. 

"...Confirming I did not notice any magical effects," she says quietly. "Are you - all right -?" 

"As with many painful experiences, the anticipation was worse than the event itself."

"...there's a tier of magical items above ordinary ones, known as 'artifacts', made by economicmagicusers of extraordinary power or with aid from 'gods'; once made 'artifacts' are very nearly indestructible and so they accumulate through the ages.  An ordinary antimagic field could not suppress their function, even if it was powerful enough to operate against every lesser magic."

"Cheliax does not have that many 'artifacts', and many of those that do exist are weapons or destructive or have some ill-effect on their users.  The one I am wearing is in fact about as close to purely beneficial as any 'artifact' can be."

"That it has become this much a part of myself and is now incredibly unpleasant to remove, might perhaps be considered a downside.  But that is not something that you wearing it for two seconds would do."

The antimagic around Merrin is at the divine level - possibly beyond that, it cannot be ruled out, but definitely at least at the divine level.  This did not seem like the work of any mortal wizard to begin with; but now that has been ruled out essentially entirely.  Even if an antimagic field had been cast at ninth-circle power, in some newly-researched form that conformed exactly to a person, that spell - which would notably not have any elemental vulnerabilities - would not be able to suppress the function of any artifact, let alone that one.

It says...something, about the world - and about Cheliax - that most of their powerful 'artifacts' are destructive in nature. Especially given that, from Merrin's impressions so far, it's not obviously the case that economicmagic itself is just vastly better at destruction than beneficial effects. 

She nods. "That's interesting. I have to confess, I'm really curious what the beneficial effect is." 

"It... does seem a bit unpleasant to say that, when it's something you apparently can't have."

"In any case, we are done here, and this last result in particular means that an incredibly busy person named Aspexia Rugatonn needs to be bothered about this.  I'd hoped to avoid or at least delay that."

"I think even if it would be upsetting, it - seems important for my understanding what Golarion and Cheliax are like and how things work? I don't– I mean, I'm starting out from a position of this - I assume - being a thing I couldn't have in dath ilan either and would never have expected to have, it's not - letting down an existing expectation. Unless you mean it's the infohazard kind of unpleasant." Though Merrin would be kind of surprised if Albe is tracking that in the same way a Keeper would; it seemed like their language didn't even have a word for the concept. 

And it's starting to feel a bit like there's a PATTERN here, of Albe having very good reasonable reasons not to tell Merrin what's going on - but Merrin is any amount worried that some of the actual reason is it seeming less complicated for Albe in the short run. Which it probably is, and maybe there are genuine risks too. It still seems like an excellent way to, in the longer run, have an underinformed Merrin in the position of needing to make a high-stakes judgement call and not being prepared to weigh all the considerations correctly. 

- though she's now kind of distracted by the additional update on exactly how important Albe must be within Cheliax. Since she apparently personally possesses, not just one of the rare and expensive powerful artifacts, but one of the even rarer ones with non-destructive effects. Of course, she had already known that Albe was someone with a high level of skill and authority, but she'd previously been imagining Albe as one of a number of trusted highly-paid-Security-cleared-consultants-with-considerable-autonomy-and-authority, presumably the one whose schedule was open at the moment Merrin arrived in Golarion. But being in possession of an extraordinary magical artifact that may have literally required a 'god''s input to create is...the kind of thing where surely there is only one person like that in Cheliax. 

She's slightly irritated that no one tried to warn her??? Maybe they (correctly) realized that this would be extremely intimidating for her, but Merrin would have coped with it. 

......This does not make it less confusing that Albe was flirting with her. 

"It makes me smarter."

"I... would not be the sort of person who gets called in on a matter like this, if I had not managed to inherit it."

Wow! Okay! Albe maybe had a point, that is definitely is something that is slightly upsetting to discover exists when you yourself cannot have it! ...Not that there's a low-hanging counterfactual here where if only she wasn't inherently anti-magical she could be smarter, since it requires a rare and incredibly powerful artifact - one that was maybe made a long time ago, and passed down in Albe's family, she did mention that artifacts like it tend to 'accumulate over the ages.' 

(Interesting that it sounds like something that was in fact in the possession of her - parents? And not the Governance of Cheliax. This is sort of a guess, still, but the way Albe is phrasing it, that little hesitation, does not make it sound like she would have been selected by Governance out of everyone in the entire country to receive it. ...Merrin suspects this fact that she's just learned contains a lot of information about the Governance of Cheliax, she's just - still very unsure how to interpret it.) 

Pre....sumably it was not inherited from the branch of her ancestry that came from the 'Chaotic Evil' continuum dead-people-place, even though in fact it sounds like that is one of the more - unique and noteworthy - elements of Albe's ancestry? Merrin is not entirely sure of that though! Since she knows absolutely nothing about the continuum of 'Chaotic Evil', except that it's the opposite of 'Lawful Good', so probably just about as different from Cheliax as you can find anywhere in this world. And...maybe...has a lot of sadism and masochism? Since this is, so far, the thing that Merrin most confidently knows is associated with 'Evil'. She doesn't see why that would obviously correlate with it being a place that turns out lots of really cool superpowerful magical artifacts. 

...There is a hint of an implication there that the parent or other relative who passed it down to her is dead, since it - sounds like the artifact is not one that someone would be likely to willingly hand over while still alive. Merrin isn't sure whether grieving would be different, in a world where people just go to other places when they die, and she definitely has no idea how to give her condolences in a non-hurtful-or-offensive way, so she doesn't say anything.

"I'm glad I know that," she says quietly. "It's - the kind of thing that I could imagine being relevant in an emergency." Sure, it would take a bizarre edge case sort of emergency, but what do you THINK Merrin's entire specialization is in. 

"If you were glad to know that, are you in the market for even more information I'd have thought you'd have preferred not to know?  I am still trying to calibrate - I'm not sure that word came out right, I've said it but now I don't know what it means."

This is a very important question and a difficult one to answer, and Merrin gives it the careful thought it deserves, for nearly a whole minute. 

"...Yes, I think, if it's information you were worried I would prefer not to know because it would make me sad. I'm - I think even for dath ilan I'm unusually able to cope with that, it - there are plenty of Exception Handling subcases that involve positing that something incredibly horrifying and upsetting just happened, and I - have to be able to know if I could handle that in real life, right, if it were suddenly not-hypothetical. I - think I'm unusually fine with a lot of things that are sort of infohazard-adjacent in the direction of, like, knowing that a nice thing exists and I don't and can't have it. I have no reason to think I'm fine with other categories of infohazards, the kind that only very high-ranked Keepers know, but sort of by definition I don't know what they are."

Merrin shrugs a little. "If it's a concern like the one you had with explaining the axes of categorization, where you think I might - end up confused and effectively more wrong than I was before - then I don't have much evidence to make a case to you that I'm not vulnerable to that. Though I do have a lot of practice at - knowing when I'm missing context and judging when it's safest to just not take actions. That comes up in Exception Handling training. If you just tell me that I ought to bump up the internal odds I'm putting on 'still being confused and wrong' then I can probably compensate for it before it would get to the point of taking ill-advised actions." 

"As you wish, then.  Anybody you see in the hallways wearing something on their head is probably wearing a headband that enhances some aspect of their mentation.  It's not that only artifacts can do that, it's that this one is more powerful and enhances more aspects of my mentation simultaneously.  Before taking it off, I cast three spells on myself that only last minutes, but in combination can do two-thirds of what my artifact does in three of the most important regards, which is why I didn't fall over after taking it off."

"Once Cheliax was sure that you weren't the sort to try to destroy Cheliax or Golarion, they'd have probably given you one of the more relatively powerful headbands short of the artifact level, which enhanced whichever single aspect of mentation you most needed as powerfully as this headgear enhances three of mine.  Spellcasters could have temporarily enhanced other aspects of your mentation if you were blocked on some exceptionally difficult problem."

"That's what they would have done for you, if not for the antimagic field, if any of that could work for you."

"That's all the sad news that was coming immediately to mind.  Would you like more sad news like that if it came up in the future?"

Merrin, again, tries to stop and think about this for the length of time it actually calls for. 

"...Yes. I would specify 'yes but only if it's decision-relevant for me but I - don't actually think that you or anyone else here can be expected to - have a detailed enough model of me and of my own models of Golarion, yet, to predict whether something is relevant. That one...is. It tells me how much Cheliax would want to prioritize my work efficiency, and even if I can't ask for that specific thing, now I'm more informed and I can consider asking for other kinds of support. - 'Calibrate' seems like exactly the right word for what you were trying to do, you were - checking whether the model of Merrin you have in your head matches with what the real me says in answer to a question, and noticing what the direction of any error or discrepancy was so you could correct it. Um, that's the way to explain the concept without any math, at least." 

Merrin pauses. Thinks for another moment. 

"- Who is this incredibly busy Aspexia Rugatonn? I'm - guessing from the context that she's someone with a high level of authority in Governance here?"

And also someone who apparently even Albe, as highly trusted as she clearly is, feels reluctance to interrupt. That seems like something where the explanation for it might be relevant to Merrin, who is likely to end up interacting with Aspexia Rugatonn face to face at some point.