Interesting.  She would have expected more of a reaction there, given Merrin's other thoughts.  She can't quite see how it relates to the slave conditioning, but it probably does.  Possibly something emotion-dulling about it in general?

"I'm not quite sure how to explain Rugatonn... she works for Asmodeus more directly than any other human in Golarion, and from the standpoint of somebody in Golarion, it has made her more than slightly odd.  Maybe if you're not from Golarion you couldn't tell the difference because we'd just all seem very odd."

"Ah, would you care to change your clothes back, and let us go find out whatever Negotiations," as close as this language comes to 'diplomacy', "has come up with for you?"

Ah, so Aspexia Rugatonn is sort of like the Golarion equivalent of a Keeper. ....Merrin catches that thought and forcibly reminds herself that she has very little evidence for this point, and actually what she should do is try not to have preconceptions, to go in and notice what Aspexia Rugatonn is actually like, and then use that to propagate inferences on what the gods are like. Or Asmodeus at least; she also still has very wide uncertainty on how different the gods are from each other. 

She's still on some level totally expecting Aspexia Rugatonn to be basically like a Keeper, though. 

(Merrin would, if she were taking the time to consider this explicitly, predict that she's going to have a lot more emotions later about the sad information that other people in Golarion get to have magical items enhancing various aspects of their intelligence, and Merrin does not get to have that. But it's still the case that she never had a period of building up hope for it that was then disappointed, and on an emotional level right now it just feels - smaller - than what she's already lost, e.g. "all of her home Civilization". She's very used to at least not poking at her emotions when she's in the middle of something time-sensitive, which she is right now.) 

(The fact that this kind of magic exists is - actually a straightforward positive update about Golarion, she thinks. It would partially counteract the thing she noticed earlier, the inference about what Golarion's median intelligence must be like relative to dath ilan, and it seems more likely that she could manage to rebuild at least a fraction of Civilization, here, if she has the help of people with cognition-enhancing magical effects.) 

"All right." She puts her shoe back on, and - is it flirting to change back in front of Albe - the question is really whether it's more flirtatious than anything else so far, which she doubts. She still turns her back for it, though, mainly out of self-consciousness. 

She also retrieves her sheet of questions from the pocket of her original shirt, and then they can go find out what Negotiations, presumably a department within Governance, has come up with for her! 

Antonio has managed to dig up three expensive rare magical items that grant Tongues and can be passed around, so that up to three people can talk with Merrin at a time.  Her options for what to do next include:

- Give Antonio thirty minutes' notice on a party for the two dozen people in Egorian who seem most like they could hold up a conversation with Merrin and are interested in meeting her, with other activities performable in the meanwhile
- Talk to the three students from Ostenso who asked to follow along with the alien
- Have somebody who speaks quickly translate a book for her
- Obtain her own bedroom and rest

(Albe says she needs to run off and report to Aspexia Rugatonn, which may take a while because Rugatonn is not always interruptible.)

"Most High.  I'm afraid we have a bit of a situation on our hands."

...Can her options also include talking to someone who can ANSWER the MANY QUESTIONS that she has thoroughly and effortfully prepared and has written down and ready to go? Merrin would be interested in a party eventually but she still has some dangling Work Tasks to handle before that! 

Does Merrin prefer answers that might be slightly off or wrong, right now, or better answers in fifteen minutes after Antonio has time to bring in somebody more expert?  Also can Merrin give him a general idea of what sort of topics she means to cover?

Fifteen minutes is totally fine! (Merrin had been slightly worried that her best option here was to ask to talk to the students from Ostenso and then show them her questions, but having someone more expert sounds much better!) 

Giving a general idea of topics is a reasonable request and Merrin will cheerfully read off the topic-headings from her list of questions. She's learned some things since she made this list and so some of the details are less relevant but she thinks the major topics still apply. After some very quick rereading and reprioritization, they are (in approximate order of importance to her right now): 

- How gods work

- How the afterlives work

- How magic works 

- The history of Cheliax and also Golarion more broadly 

- The economy of Cheliax and also Golarion more broadly 

- The education system in Cheliax and also Golarion more broadly 

(Merrin really wants to add a question about the entire bizarre and confusing alignment-categorization setup but Albe thought that was maybe fraught to explain and she therefore doesn't feel comfortable asking someone, even an expert on the topic, to explain it on fifteen minutes' notice.) 

...he'll try to get, like, four people.  It may possibly be slightly longer than fifteen minutes before they are all here.  Whoever he finds first can go first.

He hopes Merrin is prepared for the fact that people in Golarion may just know less about anything than it sounds like Merrin's people may know about everything.  Just... going on the way she talks about things generally.

.....Yeah. She's kind of noticed that. 

- can she maybe go wait in a room that is somewhat comfortable? It's fine if her actual bedroom isn't ready yet. 

They can arrange a comfortable room for receiving experts; her bedroom is also ready, if she wishes.

(Merrin super wants to go hide in her bedroom right now, even if it's a new bedroom she's never seen in another world and even if it's only for fifteen minutes, but....probably it would be at least somewhat awkward to receive experts on topics related to gods and afterlives and Cheliax in her bedroom?) 

....That's not a very good reason, actually, especially since it sounds like it would be more work for someone to arrange a different room? 

Merrin would be delighted if someone could walk her over to her bedroom. She's fine with then also meeting with the relevant experts there, if they're also okay with it. 

...Cheliax is also fine with walking Merrin to her already-allocated bedroom, and then her receiving experts... not in that bedroom?  They can arrange a sitting-room nearby?  Meeting with experts inside your bedroom would be, uh, not totally not odd under local customs?

Merrin is going to assign herself some mental points for musing that this might be the case, and...probably she should deduct some kind of points for the part where she failed to care about it? 

She's suddenly very tempted to ask Antonio if it's odd under local customs for important consultants to Governance who inherited incredibly powerful intelligence-enhancing magical artifacts to try to seduce alien visitors while ostensibly running experiments in a doompunk economicmagic research laboratory. She suspects that this urge comes from the same source as whatever was prompting her not to care about whether receiving visiting experts in her bedroom would be weird, though, and it seems like a better idea to sit on it for now and wait until she's had some time to recover her balance. 

"Sure, that works fine with me." Merrin will follow whoever is available to escort her to her bedroom! What's it like? 

You can, if you're paying close attention to your environment, guess that this bedroom was hastily rearranged and redecorated.  This nice calm relaxing white bed with no chains or handcuffs on it, for example, probably wasn't in this room before she got here.  There's a shelf full of books she can't read whose dust levels nonetheless suggest that they were hastily placed here.  There's a comfortable sitting-chair that probably also wasn't here previously.  There is a clean ensuite bathroom that looks frankly horrifying in its crudity, but one that will, fundamentally, let you draw a hot bath.  There's a huge fireplace with logs, for the benefit of anybody who'd like to burn wood inside a room and inhale some of the resulting fumes.

Since it's not possible to repaint the room, per se, it is still done in blood-crimson walls, and there are both red lights and standard bright Continual Lights.  By pure coincidence, this is also what a sensible person of Civilization would prefer in the way of lighting options to avoid disturbing her sleep cycles.

There is, at least, no window exposed to the outdoors from which light cannot be fully blocked.

Merrin is someone who, in general, pays close attention to her environment! She did have some specific requests and it's thoughtful that they were so efficient about providing them, even when this was probably not a trivial outlay of resources hereabouts. 

She's...not sure what the point of the books she can't read is, unless some of them are, like, primers for learning how to read the local language? She's less horrified by the bathroom facilities than a lot of dath ilanis would be, at least, since Merrin unlike most dath ilanis has previously had occasion to bathe in a literal river. 

...She is genuinely unsure what the point of the giant alcove-box-in-the-wall and the inexplicable pile of wood, until she puts together that it's for burning and plausibly for heating - can you not do that with magic? You would think you could pull off a forced-air central heating system with a blob of Magma in place of a conventional heat source, but maybe too few people can actually do the required spell, or the blobs don't last very long? Either way Merrin doesn't even like heat much and has no intention of filling her indoor room with smoke. (She's technically lit a wood fire before, in a genuine emergency the immediate effects of hypothermia are a lot more dangerous and life-threatening than some smoke, but that was outdoors, and most actual training scenarios replace the "campfire" with a portable electric heater or chemical heat packs.) 

How does she control the lights? 

Like this!

Merrin wants to check that this works and doesn't fail in some mysterious and possibly destructive way thanks to her antimagical effects. Once this is confirmed, she thanks her room escort and asks if someone can come get her when relevant experts are available to talk to her, and then she closes the door and turns off the brighter lights and lies down on the bed. It would probably be useful to go over her questions but actually she just very badly wants fifteen minutes of rest. 

"You utter miserable fool.  I should have been consulted immediately when someone first considered the possibility of divine intervention in a matter like this, and INSTANTANEOUSLY after someone had the thought that they could not think of any deity who would do such a thing!  Fool!  FOOL!  Do you have any idea of the fate you were courting?"

It takes a lot to make Aspexia Rugatonn actually scream at you, but something like this will do it.

"Evidently not," Abrogail says, more quietly than usual.  "What fate -"

"The fate of Numeria.  Something fell there, from out of the sky, and everything about it was sealed by an impenetrable barrier, that remains there to this day, the people who were within that barrier were not seen in any afterlives, that is the fate you were courting, for yourself, for ME, for everyone in the palace, in Egorian, maybe in CHELIAX, YOU FOOL!"

"Ah.  Otolmens."

"...I suppose that would fit with the antimagic shell, from the little I know of Her."

Aspexia physically slaps Abrogail.