Esta will conjure up his Create Food and Water, and eat some of it.  Of the rest, he sets aside the remainder of one man's rations for himself, and the rest for Mariona; placing his portion by a scrap of his clothing, and her own portion by one of her things; to indicate which is which, if she should wake before he next does.

Mariona has had too little to eat, by the looks of her.  Create Food and Water can make enough food for, well, quite a number of people if Esta should choose to cast it that way.  But that food only lasts 24 hours, and cannot be stocked.  So he makes enough for five people, and leaves Mariona enough for four.

He drinks, sparingly, because he has not been advised where to urinate if he feels the need.

When it begins to become cold, he will go back into the bedroll with Mariona.

No.  With Merrin.

The two are not the same.

It feels stranger, to climb into bed with her, than it has felt to lay with any woman in these past two decades' memory.  There is a tension in him, an anxiety, that he last remembers from seminary, being ordered into the bed of an instructor who had commanded him to please her.  He failed, which students of hers almost always did, at that task, and was hurt about it.

It is perfectly obvious to the Esta of today that this was exactly the thing Madalin found enjoyable, hurting men for failing to please her.  It is astonishing to him, now, that even when he was seventeen years old, this could possibly not have been obvious to him.  But part of Esta thinks that inverse-Mariona -- Merrin, he must remember that name -- will prove to be that again for him: a more powerful woman who finds something to do in bed with you that a man ought to enjoy, and ensure that you do not enjoy it, because she is pleased to make you feel a failure as a man.

Esta mans up about it, crushes down all fear, and climbs into the bedroll.  It is certainly shameful for a man to fear being naked next to a woman who has not yet humiliated him.  She's probably Chaotic Good, anyway.

Well.  Dark-Tapestried Lawful Evil.

The two may not be the same.

Merrin has been operating solo on a dangerous exoplanet for forty-two - now almost forty-three - 64-hour days, which is something that encourages a certain flavor of constant vigilance. She also went to sleep with a not-quite-officially-resolved medical emergency on her mind, which lends weight to a different kind of constant vigilance. 

When Estha approaches to join her in the bedroll, she does open her eyes briefly, and in an obviously-pure-instinct way will glance at him - an assessing calculating gaze, in her head she's just confirming that he appears alert and is moving normally and isn't bleeding anywhere and is still connected to the oxygen and not showing signs of increased work of breathing (and she already half-consciously made a decision that they can start acclimatizing him tomorrow when she can monitor the process) - and then lifts her arm just enough to glance at the wrist-mounted mini console screen where the wireless monitoring equipment (which will approximately just not have been at all in Esta's way) has been feeding, to confirm that it wasn't an alarm that woke her, and also the approximate time. It's a bit past 01:00. The air feels like the right temperature to her for a bit past 01:00 so there's nothing to be troubleshooting there. 

Great, fine, nothing's on fire, he's lost the sat probe - probably it was in his way - but his heart rate is fine and he's not looking short of breath. Merrin did cache in her memory before going to sleep that she had made a decision that sleeping was the correct tradeoff and nothing is telling her loudly that she misjudged that. 

(Merrin would be mortified to realize that she remembered to tell him where to find food and water and did not at all think to tell him about the toilet facilities, but in fact her toilet facilities are still limited to "a bucket in the tent when it's too hot or cold to go out, and a hole she dug a hundred meters away from camp to use at other times and to empty to bucket into", because she at no point had the slack to make herself an actually nice bathroom and short of that was not especially motivated to prioritize it.) 

She wriggles over a bit to make room for Estha, and will cuddle up against him and go right back to sleep. 

...a thing Esta has sort of not been thinking about is the part where he has been given one (1) Heal spell.

It cures, among other effects, insanity.

If Asmodeus had granted him the two Heals that Esta had asked, it would have been obvious to use Heal spells on both of them.

Then, the obvious path-influencing meaning of his Lord granting Esta only one Heal spell, is that Esta is only meant to Heal himself of whatever debuffs he has taken from his encounter, and not Heal Mariona.

Why?  Because it will not help Mariona?  Because her insanity could not be cured that way?

But Mariona -- no, Merrin -- might have received ability damage or debuffs from any number of sources, like poor nutrition.  It seems unlikely that a Heal spell would not do her some good; it is more comprehensive in its own way than even 7th-circle Regenerate.

So it may also be that it will not be advantageous to Asmodeus, if Mariona is cured.  Perhaps Merrin's continued insanity would be useful to Him.

...Esta will see how this matter plays out, of whether Asmodeus seems to be steering or blind, in this place.  And then he will choose what to do with his one Heal spell, before this spell-cycle ends; knowing, as he does, that he might receive no other Heal tomorrow, if he proves unable to ask.

It's sort of obvious that if you only get one Heal spell, and you're not sure you get another, and you even might be under any sort of debuff or insanity you don't know about, that the far more valuable 6th-circle cleric in charge of things gets to use it on himself.

Yes yes, very obvious.  Maybe too obvious.  Esta's intuition says that the obvious decision here may possibly not be the right one.  He hasn't figured out a reason to believe that, but he means to go on trying.

Go away, unhelpful thought, and let Esta sleep.

Some number of hours later, Merrin has had enough sleep that the accumulating physical discomforts will start to encroach on her awareness. (She got some face sunburn while trying to drag Estha back with her faceplate open to run oxygen tubing to him, her head covering isn't as good, and she's hungry and thirsty and needs to pee...) 

She's also incredibly physically drained, though, and is having the Post-Emergency Energy Crash where for a while after pushing herself past her limits on adrenaline, it becomes kind of hard to take actions on purpose. The emergency sure seems to be over. And she's so cozy and she's cuddling her boyfriend. She does not initially try to move at all, or even open her eyes. 

For the first time in months, she’s not alone.

That’s good, right? She gets to be happy now?

…There’s a thought, happening, in Merrin’s head. 

In some sense, obviously “she” is “having” the thought. It’s in her brain.

In another sense, though, it doesn’t feel like that at all. A thread of thought is pulling itself together, and -

- there’s a mental motion that Merrin can choose to do, sometimes, when she has the realization that she’s being an idiot and failing to apply all of the thinkoomph she can bring to bear to a problem. It feels a bit like waking up fully, like summoning her entire consciousness and reflective-self-awareness into her body so she can be fully attending to whatever she's being stupid about and then actually try. 

Among many habitual thoughts in Merrin's head, there's a rather new set of tightly-coupled cognitive processes, new habits-of-thought and mental affordances woven together in a bundle with each other and not nearly as entangled with the habits-of-thought that drive the cognitive subprocesses associated with the usual “Merrin’s experience of her own internal monologue". Of course there is; she’s been effortfully working on this for six planetary months, nudging and poking and imagining from different angles until she manages to generate a useful thought that feels in-character for a fictional character who is really, in many ways, extremely different from the person Merrin is or at least from the person Merrin conceives of herself as being.

Nothing weird or implausible or magical about that. It was just a useful way to access frames of thinking that Merrin would previously have gotten by talking to other people, which was no longer an option, and to get something like an “outside perspective” on her stupid problems, and to feel less desperately alone. 

This tightly-coupled set of habits-of-thought, which Merrin has neatly packaged together under a specific name, is now doing something not unlike “trying to wake up, and to summon its full consciousness and reflective-self-awareness into the body in which it is apparently instantiated right now and the situation in which APPARENTLY it finds itself.” 

Merrin. Hey. Merrin. 

mrrgghhhwhat 

Notice your confusion, Merrin. 

Look, Merrin hasn't failed to notice her confusion!!!!! She spent most of the last day feeling like she wasn't doing much except noticing how superheated confused she is about everything!!!!! 

(Also, uh, she did not...ask...Laeirthe for input? What's even happening right now?) 

...First things first, she needs to keep pretending to be asleep. They really need to talk uninterrupted. Okay? 

Laeirthe is an imaginary fictional character why is he telling her what to do???? 

Because she's not already doing it! Obviously!

And she is failing to properly notice her confusion. Or - maybe it's more precise to say that she’s failing to attend to it or to take responsibility for it. 

Is she really so desperate to wriggle out of doing any of her own thinking that she picked the moment someone else turned up to start deferring to him on epistemic matters? Even though Laeirthe has not been incredibly impressed so far with this Estha person? 

....That's kind of rude and mean? 

Look, she's the one who decided to build a model of a character whose characteristic opinions of people are pretty harsh. This was not new information. It’s not personal. Laeirthe is just fundamentally pretty unimpressed with most people. 

Merrin knows she's worse at most things than most people, he doesn't need to convince her of that, the part she's irritated about is being judgemental of Estha. 

WHY IS SHE LIKE THIS

RIGHT????

Anyway. 

The thing is, Merrin’s thoughts are the ones he can see, and so, yeah, Laeirthe is going to end up having a lot of specific biting criticism. It's, again, not personal. 

But his topic critique right now is not, actually, that Merrin is not very smart. Fine, he’s feeling a bit cramped having thoughts in here, but overall his impression is not that Merrin's current problem is inadequate thinkoomph to solve her problems. She's been doing all of this very impressive and difficult scientific investigation and modeling of a dangerous exoplanet, and devising a clever strategy and prioritization order to survive its dangers! 

Laeirthe's current impression is that Merrin is simply NOT GIVING HERSELF ENOUGH CREDIT for her actual, obvious ability to maintain her own model of the world and test her own hypotheses. She’s an entire person with her own entire mind! 

(Laeirthe does not seem to be that, right now. He seems to be a simulation of a fictional character, which is a pretty odd thing to realize is one's ontological status, but he’s matter-of-fact about it.)