“Don’t stab yourself?  You can’t hurt me with it.”

Okay then. "I will endeavor not to stab myself." Merrin takes the blade by the hilt and, if nothing weird happens when she does, will spend an entire minute just holding it and moving it around trying to get a sense of the weight and balance and how much force she has to exert to move it, before trying to bring it anywhere at all close to her head. 

(She's still really confused. There must be a reason why it made sense from Albe's perspective to hand Merrin an arm-length knife to trim her hair rather than something more practical. Maybe there's a kind of magical effect that can be placed on a blade but only if it's above a certain size? Maybe Albe is from a species with nonhuman psychology and she doesn't native have an urge to avoid danger and so sees no downside? Maybe Cheliax just has no institutional habits around minimizing risk to researchers because everyone goes to afterlives? ...She's reaching here, and probably it's none of those things and it's instead somewhere in the vast space of hypotheses that Merrin cannot possibly single out with the still rather minimal information she has on Cheliax.) 

(She's also faintly embarrassed that she has apparently let herself be socially-pressured into doing something that would not pass muster in any dath ilani research facility, but it's not actually stressing her out especially; Merrin has never had very strong instincts toward avoiding danger to herself.) 

Does the mega-knife seem to be behaving predictably and as-expected for a piece of metal of that length and weight? Merrin is also trying to gauge Albe's reaction to her caution, in case that adds any clarity on WHY THIS. 

“…are you sure you don’t just want me to do this?  I wish I could offer you a scissors, shears, scalpel, razor, or just a smaller blade, but every single one of those here is economagiced.”

"- Oh, is that why. I now feel slightly silly about not having just asked." Merrin thinks for a few moments. "Hmm, I think even operating on the principle of 'something completely random and unexpected could happen because I have no idea how anything works, it seems safer for you to do it. Assuming you have practice handling this thing. ...Though if you do have scissors with economagic effects on them, it seems likely given our observations so far that my holding them would cancel the effect anyway? Not sure if you're worried that they would explode instead or something." 

Everything about this interaction is disorienting and Merrin isn't sure how to attribute this to Albe-related socialweirdness, the enormous undifferentiated pile of cultural differences, or just that she's really antsy to get this done and move on to her several pages of questions to ask. In none of those scenarios is in Albe's fault, though, and Merrin reminds herself that Albe is probably having a similarly confusing and frustrating experience from the other side. (And Albe, who does have a clear understanding of local economicmagic, probably finds Merrin's paranoia about this obnoxious.) 

She tries to very carefully wrangle the megaknife so she can offer it hilt-first the way Albe did when handing it to her. 

Albe takes it from her much more carefully than she offered it, back when Merrin was in control of the taking-motion.

"It's true that we haven't tested your ability to use magical devices, but I am more concerned with the question of what happens if a magical blade is forced to cut through your hair.  That seems like an issue where what I actually want to do is quickly enchant a small needle with an unnoticeably weak enchantment, and use that to poke your toe, so that, if the result is that the enchantment fails disruptively, it is not then right next to your head."

As soon as Albe is holding the blade, looking very much in control of it, she quite gently and slowly brings it close to Merrin's head, where Merrin can at all times see it, and shaves off a small lock from the end of Merrin's hair.

Moments later that lock floats in front of Merrin.

"No longer magic-nullifying.  A pity.  There would be so many uses for hairs that disrupted magic, though it would still be quite the painful trip to transport them to the many places they would be useful, without instant-travel magic."

"...Right. That makes sense. Also hearing you explain your reasoning is around risk analysis here is - helpful. It's just -" the analogy she's using is how careful she would want someone to be in a high-containment-level biology research lab in dath ilan if they knew absolutely nothing about biology and also couldn't read the safety handbook, and she's trying to be that level of careful, but she doesn't feel like explaining it all, "- um, I don't know what to be cautious of, and I am used to working in conditions that are hazardous in some way, so I'm - trying to be as careful as though this room contains every hazard I can think of, since annoying you is a less bad outcome than accidentally seriously injuring myself, sorry. If you explain why you're doing something a certain way, that gives me information about what isn't dangerous as well as what is." 

Watching Albe be visibly careful is also pretty reassuring! Merrin now feels slightly bad about having considered that maybe her species was inherently incapable of taking danger seriously. She's glad she didn't say it out loud. 

"That is disappointing. ...And kind of weird? It's - not like the hair is any more not-alive than when it was attached to my head - does hair conduct magic?" Merrin doesn't even know what that would mean and it might be an incredibly stupid question. "Or does the antimagic effect somehow - have a sense of me-as-an-object, that includes my hair if it's attached to me but not otherwise? ...Oh, a test we could do is if my clothes have the effect while they're on me." 

"I already tested your clothing; it doesn't dispel my magical hand on contact."  A brief light pressure, through Merrin's clothing, on her upper chest.  "Come to think, if you want to avoid all possibility of damaging your clothing, do you possibly want to remove that clothing, or at least the upper portion of it, before we test the interaction of your still-attached hair with other ontologically-simple energies besides Positive?"

IS THIS FLIRTING??????? 

...Flirting in a high-containment-level biology research lab would be a really bad idea and probably their highly-paid-Security-cleared-consultant is not...actually...doing that...? Lesson, probably: interacting with nonhumans who are also from a different Civilization is really confusing. Which Merrin could probably have predicted going in, so it's not a very contentful lesson, but still. 

You know what's ALSO a bad idea: being topless in a high-containment-level biology research lab. Why would you do that. 

"...Sure, but could I borrow a different outfit I care less about damaging?" See, this is what LAB COATS are for. "In case there's a side effect that's, like, non-magical heat release, I would rather my clothes get damaged than me. ....Um, if I'm being paranoid about things that are totally not actually dangerous, you can also just tell me that." 

"Oh, yes, that makes perfect sense," Albe says, not sounding at all disappointed by it.  "There is not nonmagical clothing here, though.  Let me just step outside for a moment and steal somebody else's shirt from them - may I trust that you'll go on staying in the center of the room and not wander off from there, at least not more than a few steps?"

"I will stay in the center of the room and not wander off." It's probably responsible for Albe to double-check this, even though Merrin does not, in fact, need to be told twice to follow a basic safety precaution. "In dath ilan we would have signage to remind visiting non-specialists of things like that, but I'm not actually at risk of forgetting." 

"In Golarion we can recover from mistakes like that and it's not too much of a disaster if somebody forgets.  I hope you're not too offended if I say that it seems you come from a very terrified society, maybe not without reason, but still."

Albe leaves through the only visible door before this can be answered.

Well, yes, the downside of getting a researcher killed is going to be lower if most individuals are less risk-averse due to dying and ending up in an afterlife being a fine outcome for them. And then their Civilization wouldn't have to pay the really absurd salaries that dath ilan does in order to get anyone willing to take on actually-dangerous jobs, which is what provides a strong incentive to make facilities not just safe but legibly, verifiably safe, with a documented history of very low accident rates. Merrin wonders if Cheliax even keeps statistics on accidents. 

'We can recover from mistakes like that' doesn't sound quite like what someone would say about fatal incidents being less intensely desirable-to-avoid because employees wouldn't be too upset about ending up in the afterlife? It's still inconvenient for the organization, presumably. (Though it's any information toward the afterlives being nice. She should ask at some point if people generally know beforehand which one they'll end up in or if the selection only happens later.)

Non-fatal incidents...would be less costly to an organization if you had instantaneous healing magic, and didn't need to cover expensive medical treatment as well as having the researcher off work for a significant length of time? But that still doesn't quite fit with how confidently Albe said that mistakes - period - were recoverable. 

........can you get people back from afterlives? 

Merrin is going to ask Albe this question as soon as she gets back. 

Albe returns, bearing the shirt and pants of, it looks like, some man who worked for Governance.  "He whined a bit but I was able to get his clothes off him in the end," Albe states, and offers the items to Merrin.

Merrin hadn't actually been meaning to deprive some other Governance employee of their clothes that they were wearing for work, she had been assuming there were spares, like at every job she's ever worked! 

If they do actually have magic to get dead people back from afterlives, that...would explain a lot about the general attitude toward safety being very disorienting for Merrin. Even if it was expensive, once they were at the point where the additional safety features required to save one researcher's in expectation would be more expensive than just bringing them back in case of a fatal accident, then the cost-benefit analysis would tilt toward doing that. 

"Um, what was his name? I should apologize to him later. Also, um, before I forget, does your economicmagic let you bring people who die back from their afterlife or am I making a wrong inference somewhere?" 

"I didn't think to get his name, but I paid him.  Yes, we can do that, and I am not sure it would fail for you.  Still, we should not test it."

Albe is still making no visible move to leave the room so Merrin can change.

"I would also really rather not test it! It just makes your entire attitude toward risk-assessment make way more sense. Though I assume," hope, but she's being polite and charitable here, "that you're taking into account if it might not work on me, and being more cautious than you would with a random economicmagic researcher." 

Obvious corollary, which nonetheless only occurs to Merrin about ten seconds later: if people feel less incentive to avoid careless accidents, then...maybe...it's not against the standard policies and also common sense to flirt in a magic research lab???? 

If Merrin doesn't want to be flirted with then she should probably say something explicitly, because not doing that leads down the path of avoidable ridiculous errors that even fictional characters who are supposed to be making mistakes don't make because it wouldn't be believable. 

...Merrin is not sure that she definitely doesn't want to be flirted with? It's mostly just very hard to assess while she's so confused. Partly because, well, she is just definitely less pretty than Albe, who is an outlier on that dimension in the same sense that a mountain is an outlier among pebbles. Maybe she thinks Merrin is interesting because of the antimagical effect, on top of the whole 'being from another Civilization that she clearly finds impressive' bit? 

This is such a romance trope. 

Should she be updating toward yes, the specific world she landed in was selected by some process, and it was the romance hypothesis? Because she wasn't even being serious when she came up with that as an example! 

...On further thought, having an inherent antimagical field effect is ALSO a VERY RECOGNIZABLE TROPE but has the multiverse failed to notice that Merrin is only very dubiously asexual and does that mean she can stop shutting out all magic by learning to fully unlock her sexuality– ....if that is how the reality she now finds herself in works, then Merrin is going to– she doesn't even know what. Have a lot of processing to do? 

They have to do WHAT to shut down the antimagic field.

How would dath ilan even know that would happen, if they don't have magic -

What was that concept for the thing that was supposedly doing it -

"I am trying to take into account your non-repairable nature.  It is possible that, the concept being such a foreign one, I am not trying hard enough.  I haven't been asking you for instruction on how to try harder, because it is in fact something I'd expect you to plainly not know, given your ignorance of all principles of economicmagic."

"It occurs to me, saying as much, that I should also describe in more detail the implications of the test recently performed: a field with that property is more characteristic of something that might be done to you rather than something you are.  If you cut the hair of an intrinsically magical being, it would retain whatever magical properties it had and be useful perhaps in constructing enchanted items.  If I cast a spell to protect myself against ontologically-simple fire, and visited the continuum of ontologically-simple fire, my hair would not burn there; but upon being cut from my head, the severed hairs would burn."

"Since your language does not have any word for 'god', the obvious sort of being who might be causally-responsible here, could not be a sort of potentially causally-responsible force on the dath ilan side of things.  Do you know of anything other than 'gods' which might, from your side of reality, have a reason to do such a thing to you?"

"The meta-level principle that doesn't require any domain knowledge to give as advice would be just, if you're about to do something, stop and spend a minute or five minutes assuming it will go disastrously and listing the possible explanations for how that you can think of, and then making sure you've got precautions against all of those," Merrin says, since this is the easiest question to answer. 

....Yes, in fact, Merrin did just now think of an explanation that would in some sense qualify as being a possibly causally-responsible entity from - she's not sure it would make sense to describe as 'the dath ilan side of things' so much as the, what, broader structure of reality that which both dath ilan and Golarion are embedded within? ...Merrin is not a Keeper and has no idea how to think about that kind of causality, let alone assess whether it's plausible. 

Also, not only does she not know how to explain it in a way that would make sense and not sound utterly ridiculous, it would also be so incredibly awkward. 

- oh, there might be versions of this which are not the Romance Hypotheses, where it would make sense for her to be selected into a world on the basis of having an antimagical field. It could be Plot Relevant in some other form.  

She's also...not...sure...that it would be a causally-responsible force of the kind that one would describe as 'doing a thing' to her? As opposed to, say, selecting a Merrin out of all the possible worlds because dath ilanis - or dath ilanis who happen to be asexual-ish - are inherently antimagical within the ontology of Golarion's magic. ...Also the fact that she's only asexual-ish in the first place seems like - some reason to think the selection process is not 'romance tropes from a very specific dath ilani subgenre of fiction', even if that were a way that things could work, because she doesn't cleanly fit it. 

Merrin has no idea how to reason about this and really doesn't want to be trying to do it while Albe is looking at her and waiting for her answer. 

"I - might have some guesses but it's very complicated and I don't think I fully understand it myself and, um, I don't know how to explain it without either you thinking I'm insane or you ending up believing a thing that is not actually what I meant. I can try to think through what-all the prerequisites are but I can't do that on the spot. So pending that - could a god here have done it? We did notice a change in the behavior, right, it looked like I wasn't initially immune to instant-movement magic but it only worked once, that could be evidence it happened on the Golarion side. ...is it the sort of thing you can just ask Asmodeus? Sorry if that's a stupid or unworkable suggestion, it was on my question-list to ask if communication with gods is possible but I haven't had a chance to go through my list yet." 

After this she should at some point ask about the continuum of ontologically-simple fire because WHAT, but it's rude to overload someone's working memory by asking multiple unrelated questions at once like that.  

"Gods intervene directly in Golarion only very rarely.  This, if it's an intervention - just doesn't seem very much like anything I've heard attributed to any god who's immediately coming to mind, not just in terms of goals, but methods.  I've never heard of a god just slapping a persistent antimagical field on somebody, with no obvious purpose to it, and not, sending anyone a vision telling them to do something.  Gods can most easily act in ways that - reflect their natures - and I cannot think offhand of any god whose nature easily matches to throwing shells of antimagic around people.  If they did that anyways, it would be madly, insanely expensive to them, for an effect as powerful as this one."

"For that matter, I wouldn't expect Asmodeus to be especially happy about some other god doing this in Cheliax without his permission; it is something gods would usually negotiate among themselves first."

"That there is no obvious explanation on Golarion's side is why I asked you sooner rather than later about dath ilan's side, even though you apparently had no magic there."

"It is very expensive for Asmodeus or Heaven to send us information or commands, and they will not do so only for our having asked it.  Else we would have done that at once and earlier."

Things Merrin has just learned about gods, which will hopefully make sense once she has time to think about them: 

- Gods can do interventions in the world, but with various costs. 

- Interventions cost less if they 'reflect' a god's 'nature' whatever that even means. 

- Albe can't think of an obvious candidate god whose nature tends toward applying antimagical effects. 

- Gods can send people visions to give instructions? 

- Humans (and nonhumans, presumably) can request information or instructions (and presumably interventions) but providing this will be costly for the gods in question. 

She should ask Albe for a list of what interventions various gods have been known to do, other than sending 'visions' with instructions, and also she should ask how, exactly, one asks questions of a god. 

(Because she could really use some help over here and if she knows a way to ask for it from beings with 4x as much thinkoomph as her then she might as well try– okay, she should spend somewhat longer considering whether it's a good idea and what unknown horrible downsides it could have, she has to remind herself that even Lawful Good gods are not actually Keepers who she can definitely fully trust. But if it's relatively cheaper for a god to receive a message - which it sounds like it is - then she does want to consider it. Maybe she could ask Asmodeus to warn her off the worst mistakes she could make by trying to act in Golarion uninformed.) 

It's Albe's turn to have her question answered, though. "I can...try to give you the short version of my possible explanation? Um, bearing in mind that it's incredibly weird and I am probably not smart enough or informed enough about the underlying causal structure of reality to fully understand it let alone explain it to someone with none of the background, so I might say something really misleading or it might, in fact, be impossible because things don't work that way. I do notice that I'm feeling really nervous about giving you the short explanation if you intend to take any immediate actions based on it." 

"I'd feel less hesitant about that promise if I could not imagine many, many things you might say that would in fact call for immediate action.  I will at least consult you before rushing off, and be properly hesitant about acting whenever inaction does not lead into imminent emergency and disaster - would that suffice?"

"Fair enough." Merrin wouldn't like it much if someone asked her to commit to that, either, especially if she had a role with significant responsibility and autonomy in a very large and high stakes project on the scale of 'running a country'. 

This seems like a topic that will be especially prone to mistranslation - where Baseline will have words that don't map to existing words in the local language - and also one where there could be particularly undesirable consequences if what Albe hears is different from what Merrin was intending to convey. She feels a lot better about trying this with Albe, actually, rather than Antonio. Albe continues to be impressively quick and careful in her thinking, at least when she's bothering to describe what she's thinking. 

"Okay. So. Reality is - bigger than just Golarion or dath ilan. This is something experts in dath ilan already thought, even when - um, as far as I know - we hadn't actually visited other worlds, it's - something you can infer if you understand math at a deep enough level. Which I don't, I'm - carrying a lot of fragments of things that people smarter than me figured out. Anyway. I was in dath ilan, and now I'm here, and it wasn't as though instant-movement economicmagic moved me between two planets, it was weirder than that, I - died, I'm pretty sure I remember dying insofar as that's even an experience. So - something I know for sure is that somehow, in the whole thing that reality is, it - ended up being the result of some causal process, that I'm here now, because it has to be, math and - reality being made of math - are deeper than what we can directly interact with in Golarion, or what I interacted with in dath ilan. ...That still leaves a lot of variables unspecified, though. It could be random, that I'm here, but it could also be not-random - that there was some kind of - not an intelligent mind in the sense that humans are, but a something, that selected me and selected Golarion and put me here based on the combination meeting certain criteria. ...Does that make sense at all so far?" 

"Dath ilan already knows that the multiverse is much larger than they can see from dath ilan, to the point where they already suspected it might contain something like Golarion.  Something from that greater multiverse moved you from dath ilan to Golarion and you don't know what.  Correct me if required."