The form factor doesn't matter.  Esta has never been told about any fundamental constraint on [incense] other than that it has to cost three-quarters of an average urban laborer's annual salary, you have to set it on fire, and it needs to smell good when you do.

And you know what, Esta really does not want to be stuck on this planet forever, and Esta is worried that his godchosen spells are meant to communicate, "Go solve this problem right now before your Holding Bag gets destroyed by the next tidal bore going past it."

Augury has a casting time of 1 minute.  What Esta proposes, here, is that he buy all her incenses off Merrin via bona fide draft on his bank; that they put all of these things into a form factor where they will burn slowly enough that each one would burn for over 2 minutes; and they try lighting all of them and see if the Augury takes hold on any of them.  Hopefully Esta will have enough of a feel for the magic to tell which incense if any the spell is hooking into, and they can extinguish any others, but that part is not as important as getting off the planet.

Also, now that Esta thinks about it, the natural thing to ask for an Augury about, would be the plan of then trying to ask a Divination about roughly how far away the Holding Bag is, and then, trying to ride the tidal bore there; or, if the Divination fails to give a sufficiently precise answer, riding the tidal bore while casting Detect Magic to try to watch for the Holding Bag.  Which means that they should only cast the Augury half an hour before the tidal bore, because that's how far Augury sees into the future on Golarion.  Esta does not know how far Augury looks ahead on a planet of intact prophecy, it should not be any less, but he does not know it to be any more.

If the Augury says that's actually a terrible idea, or if the incense doesn't work, the backup plan is asking a Planar Inquiry about what sort of [outsider] Esta should call with his Planar Binding to find or retrieve the Bag.  To which end it'd be helpful if Merrin has anything that costs around 25 times one year's worth of unskilled labor, but that she has no important use for on this planet.

It's fine with Merrin to set all of her incenses on fire at once, though in that case she prooobably wants them to do it outside the cave shelter, that sounds simpler and like it requires less math than running the calculation on whether that many small fires at once would be an oxygen-consumption problem in the mostly-sealed space. 

...Merrin does not have literally any items that she has no important use for on this planet??? She feels like it would indicate some seriously poor planning on the part of the Exception Handling equipment-engineering team if there were objects she had weight allotment for that weren't re-purposable enough to be very useful here. She previously had some electronics that didn't do anything here, like the portable GPS unit, but she dismantled them for replacement parts on the armor months ago.

...If the cost benchmark is 25 times one year's worth of unskilled labor in GP based on unskilled labor-productivity in the terms Estha described to her when they were figuring out the "25 GP" conversion - as opposed to the dath ilan equivalent in labor-hours - then probably Merrin can identify something worth that much where going without it is unlikely to kill them in the next planetary month? Which could easily be worth it for a chance of getting off this planet before then. The medical diagnostic equipment is at the top of her list; there's definitely a mental flinch about giving it up, since she literally just used it after rescuing Estha, but now that he's recovered and can use healing magic - and Merrin knows that he's unusually tough and resilient to injury - it seems less likely that a blood-test analysis unit or handheld diagnostic ultrasound machine are going to be absolutely critical to their survival? 

It does not sound needful if Esta continues getting spells; and if he does not, they are likely to die here regardless.

Separately, if Merrin kept the broken pieces that she dismantled other objects to replace, Esta may be able to Mend those on a later [day].

Well, Esta thinks they have a plan, here.  And if he understood that plan correctly, it means getting up and engaging in some mild hurry as the two of them -- himself under Merrin's direction, for this part -- try to prep tidal-bore-riding equipment for Esta, before the tidal bore arrives.

Remember that this version of Estha remembers working with his version of Merrin on common emergencies, though with Merrin taking direction from him, or both of them taking direction from other commanders.  Also he has his Belt, and will not tire as quickly as the Estha she remembers.

They are, indeed, going to be rushed! But Merrin has, in fact, trained pretty heavily on scenarios where she needs to quickly coordinate with and delegate to random untrained bystanders. Delegating to Estha is an extra challenge level both because he's unfamiliar with things that even entirely "untrained" dath ilanis would know, and also Merrin is speaking a foreign language - which she knows fluently, because magic, but which lacks vocabulary terms for most of her equipment pieces or the manipulations she wants to do to them - but it does become apparent to her quickly that Estha is not actually untrained by the relevant metric.

She trains him on a reasonably simple task – sacrificing a big square of extra-tough plastic sheeting to cut into long narrow rectangles, applying strips of waterproof adhesive carefully along one edge, and sealing them up lengthwise to form tubes. Which can then be inflated with air - she has a pump for that - and bent into arbitrary shapes, held together with more adhesive, to form a suit that combines the flotation function with some padding against collisions over vital body parts (and also over the oxygen tank she's strapping to his back, which would ideally not be subject to any intense impacts. 

It would be a lot easier to do this if she could temporarily borrow parts of her own armor for it, but Merrin wants and needs the armor intact and on her; she's not directly useful for the search, since he does not in fact currently have the [spell] that would let her also [Detect Magic], but if he does end up knocked unconscious in the water again, she needs to be able to reach him fast, and that means swimming along with him.

So, annoyingly, she cannot just give him the helmet of her armor, and she doesn't really have anything else that can in less than three hours be turned into a sealed protective helmet. He's going to be getting an inflatable-tube hat for head injury prevention, attached to the cervical collar which is very conveniently already inflatable and conveniently shaped to fit over his neck, where she can use it to secure a scuba-style mouthpiece to breathe through. Even if it gets knocked out of his mouth at some point, it should still be right there and easy to find even without needing his hands. 

...On reflection, Merrin is going to give him two additional components: one of her waterproof ultra-bright battery-powered flashlights, for her to follow, and - just in case - the radio beacon she was previously using. It's not that large or heavy, and it's designed to keep working even after being dropped from a helicopter midflight, it's not fragile. 

And then there's still some plastic left, so she cuts that up larger and makes...awkward balloons, more or less...to glue on the exterior of the fitted-plastic-tubing as additional impact protection. A hard impact will almost certainly pop them, but if anything that's part of the point, they'll burst and absorb the impact forces in the process. 

The resulting gear is one of the jankiest things Merrin has designed in her entire life, and outright embarrassing, but it requires no particular skill and minimal practice to "use" – given how it does not really do anything except be very buoyant and padded, radiate visible light and radio waves, and dispense oxygen from a mouthpiece when suction is applied to it (he should practice that part). And the plastic and waterproof adhesive are both the very best material that Exception Handling materials scientists could design over many years of iteration. It's a lot less fragile than it looks. 

(She did have to steal the plastic sheeting from an existing use – covering her solar panel installation for nighttime protection from wind and rain – but she had been expecting to at some point replace that with a local-materials woven strapwrack and waterproof-dried-sailweed hood, and the afternoon is long enough that even a very long and busy morning should still leave her with plenty of time for building that.) 

With twenty minutes left to go, they'll want to trek over in the predawn twilight, Esta wearing his suit - one of the functionalities Merrin did not super build into its design was the ability to take it on or off quickly or without her help - carrying her local-material canopy shelter as a windblock, the various incenses, a whole pile of shells to use as pots to burn them in, the fire-lighting kit, the diagnostic equipment she's prepared to sacrifice as a Valuable Item, etc etc... 

This is not the best plan Esta has ever been part of.  Part of him is questioning its Wisdom.

But only conditional on it not being Asmodeus's intended plan conveyed via His godchosen spells, of course.  If it is Asmodeus's plan then it is certainly the wisest plan that could possibly be devised given Asmodeus's information, which ought to be much better information than Esta is accustomed to, given that prophecy would still function on this planet.

Esta trudges on as Merrin directs.  It does not injure his pride, for this is Asmodeus's will.  Most of Esta's pride is only there in the first place because Esta believes he has pride because that makes him a good Asmodean.

It's freezing fucking cold, but suffering is good for you.

Merrin ALSO has a lot of internal doubts about this plan! 

...It's probably not stupider-on-priors than the things she's done repeatedly, like riding the tidal current far out to sea when her ride back isn't for more than 24 hours? Or, come to think of it, jumping into the flaming tidal bore to rescue Estha. 

The improvised flotation-protective-suit looks INCREDIBLY silly but this is, like, entirely Merrin's fault, as the designer, and she doesn't quite feel on teasing terms yet with this Estha who is almost but not quite the same as the man she remembers. 

She sets up the windblock and lays out all the flammable substances to light on Estha's cue, with less than five minutes to spare before the moment of dawn. 

...The timing is going to be very tight, if in fact Estha does not get the notification to [pray] for [spells] and they proceed with the information-gathering spells. The interval between sunrise and the early end of the projected tidal bore arrival window is exactly 23 minutes. 

(Right now is the daily low, -19° C, and the improvised-bubble-wrap flotation suit incidentally provides nonzero insulation but it's not, like, meant for that. Merrin is definitely fretting a bit that Estha might be cold, if his magical armor isn't as good at climate control as her top-Exception-Handling-tech armor. He's going to be using the Planetary Adaptation spell if they go ahead with Plan Jump In The Tidal Bore, right, that water is really cold and would be incapacitating for an unprotected human within minutes - for a an unprotected human who did not have extensive cold-water-swimming training, at least, which Merrin does have, not that she's at any point taken advantage of it because swimming unprotected in the ocean here is stupid for so many reasons...) 

There's some forking paths, in this plan, depending on as many as several pieces of information and decision points; for example, will the Augury and Divination spells run off any of Merrin's incense.

But the information they want from the Augury is what happens if Esta tries jumping into the tidal bore like this, irrespective of how the other parts of the plan fork.

...hopefully that is a kind of question you can still ask Augury when it talks to prophecy rather than your god, per se?  But then if unshattered-prophecy Augury only ever told you about things you would in fact end up doing, how would that even have been useful, in the age when prophecy did still work...

The moment comes, not quite of sunrise, but of when Esta will within a minute-and-a-little (down to the unit-conversion precision) find out if he needs to pray for spells; a moment when the tidal bore's arrival is also within the 30-minute range of (Golarion) prophecy.

Light up that incense, let's see if the Augury works.

And Esta attempts to cast a 6th-circle-caster-level Augury, in a world of unshattered prophecy.

...does the incense work?

...okay.  Let's explain how all this actually functions.

Valmallos is the primordial inevitable charged with making sure that magic is difficult to cast, and requires rare and expensive spell components in order to do anything unusually cool.

Its clerics invent needlessly complicated versions of spells, try to eliminate the older simpler versions, and promulgate the public belief that if you know a simpler spellform this is a valuable secret to share only with trusted apprentices.

Valmallos locally enforces and embodies, within Creation, the transuniversal Law that says you can't have nice things except with great pains and costs.

...there's a transuniversal Law like that?

Er... yes?  Like... after you've described the festivals in Omelas, the wealth and the parties and the fun and the singing and of course the sex, none of that can really be real unless there's a child at the center living in filth and misery?

In worlds entirely without magic, the role of Valmallos or the Omelas-child must instead be played by such nonmagical forces as the Jones Act, to make shipping goods between different ports of your own country wantonly expensive.  Or if housing is becoming too cheap, by passing regulations making it much harder to build houses, until people are again living in squalor and misery.  Or by medical guilds passing bylaws that restrict the number of residencies and doctors, so not everyone can get medical care, if people were getting too healthy before then.

But in the economagical universe of Creation, where people can just cast spells without needing a whole economy behind them to enable their feats, laws like that would not be enough to prevent people from being happy and rich.

Valmallos makes sure that doesn't happen.

Dath ilan has no radioactive shit of a clue what Creation is talking about here.  Why would anyone pass laws like that?  Dath ilan doesn't.

Other places are wiser, then.

Because perhaps that is why dath ilan isn't real.

Anyway.

The way "this spell needs 25gp of incense" actually works is that when a new planet acquires enough of a population to start popping clerics, Valmallos visits the place, looks it over, and figures out some substances that ought to be difficult to mine, harvest, or compound and refine.

These then get defined as [incense].

Gods then grant their clerics, on that planet, spells designed to require that sort of material being simultaneously destroyed nearby.

This exoplanet hasn't even been named.  It has two people on it.  No births have ever taken place here.  No gods have chosen new clerics here.

Valmallos has never visited this planet.

And Asmodeus is granting His incredibly lost squirrel spells that are designed to make use of incense from its origin planet, should His pet squirrel happen to have that on hand, because Asmodeus's Day 1 loadout does not particularly assume that His incredibly lost squirrel will manufacture new incense over the course of its first day, even leaving aside how Asmodeus would need to nag Valmallos into visiting that planet in order to define anything local as 'incense' there.

Tl;dr:  This Augury spell is incredibly not going to fucking work.  It has nothing it was designed to hook onto as incense.  It fails, not the sort of failure where the spell doesn't provide information, but where the spell falls apart and is miscast immediately.

"...you can extinguish the incense, Merrin.  The spell isn't accepting any of it."

Divination presumably won't work either, not until after Esta has found the Bag of Holding and the small amount of incense there.  They cannot use Divination to get a rough sense of the Bag's distance, nor how long and far to ride the tidal bore.

Now to observe and branch on the next major fork in the plan.

...Merrin is not going to try to reason through all the implications of that for their future plans - such as "should Estha in fact jump in a tidal bore" - and how it impacts their eventual survival chances right now, when she's still lacking a lot of the relevant context and Estha is not super interruptible. They planned this all out - in a way more rushed way than she prefers to do her advance planning, but they did plan it - and now it's time to execute, and afterward is the time to discuss and make updates. 

Merrin's sunrise-time calculations are pretty fucking accurate, after this many data points. The sun is peeking above the ocean horizon, the first direct light of the morning shining long and low across the cracked limestone plateau, and annnnny mooooment now should be her best guess of Estha's best guess of how the "dawn" timing works, when the sun is about halfway above the horizon and halfway below. 

...If Estha does get a notification from his [god] about it being time to [pray] then they're going to miss the tidal bore, since he'll be uninterruptible for an hour. Merrin is kind of hoping for it! It would mean all her frantic preparations were unnecessary, but also it would mean that Estha is NOT ABOUT TO JUMP IN A TIDAL BORE in her extremely janked-together protective gear. 

Can he feel the presence of his god?

Valmallos has not visited this planet.  Asmodeus would need to try hard in order to see this planet.  Asmodeus does not even know that it is currently sunrise, there.

The reason why the Compact of Creation has a clause about granting clerics spells at similar times is so that different gods don't fight over who gets to go second, and grant their squirrels spells optimized against the other gods' squirrels' spells.

This planet is unpopulated.  It doesn't need a separate compacted schedule.  His incredibly lost squirrel remains on its home planet's schedule.