"I can't feel my [deity]."

In a sense it's good news, because if Esta wasn't even going to get the chance to use his other spells before they refreshed, it would mean either that Esta had already failed at comprehending Asmodeus's plan, or that Asmodeus was not planning all this at all.  The Augury could, indeed, have been put there expressly so that Esta would not need to waste his Divination to learn what wasn't incense.

In a sense it's bad news, because it means that Esta having to jump into a tidal bore with no Word of Recall remains a live possibility.

And also, it's bad news because it isn't certain that Esta gets new spells at all, nine hours from now, when it will be one full day since last he prayed.  Maybe Asmodeus could only afford to reach out to Esta once, and that was it, and he's on his own unless he can reach the Bag with the Plane Shift scroll and the tuning forks.

And now the plan goes down path 2.2, where path 1 was the Augury working and path 2.1 was Esta ending up praying for spells.

Merrin has been asked to avert her eyes, in the scenario where Estha did end up casting the additional information-gathering spells. The grounds for his argument were that, while he thought it was unlikely that seeing the summoned entity would harm her sanity, he wasn't sure of that and preferred to play it carefully. 

Logical enough. Laeirthe is, of course, SO SUSPICIOUS, but also fully on board with Merrin's logic that 1) Estha's concern might be genuine, and 2) agreeing not to look and then sneaking a peek anyway would make it spectacularly obvious that she didn't trust him, and would result in him trusting her less, and they don't need that. 

She watches the rest of the sunrise instead, and stares into the distance to try to catch a glimpse of the ocean. It's still visible only as a distant strip of purple, dark under the barely-risen sun. 

And Esta begins the 10-minute casting of Planar Inquiry.

He cannot, by this method, call anything that is stronger than he is -- defined not by who beats who in a fight, or who has more vitality, but by something stranger and hard to measure.  Esta would call it strength of life, if outsiders were not dead.

Esta is calling forth an Osyluth, called also Bone Devil, of which it is said that they are hungry for lore of Hell beyond their own stations, and will bargain for it with mortals.  Esta doesn't actually have that, and is hoping he can pay with Dark Tapestry transformed items according to at least their price in Merrin's dreamworld.  (He did also try asking Merrin for something unimportant but that wouldn't exist in Golarion, so he can see if the Osyluth maybe values that sufficiently; before Esta resorts to trying to pay with Merrin's valuable device, and then at last resort one of his own two Rings.)

He intends to ask the Osyluth what manner of devil he should call up, no stronger than a Planar Binding can call, to search water or locate a thing lost -- if the Osyluth cannot locate the item itself, perhaps by asking another in Hell.

...

...

Yyyeeeahhh,

if Hell has never connected to this place before,

and it's so far from any previously inhabited and connected planet that even Asmodeus has trouble seeing you,

and also it is kinda out of the way on a certain planar-interconnection level,

a little 10HD Osyluth is not going to make it to you in person on the strength of a 3rd-circle spell.

"The first [spell], the 3rd-[circle] [Planar Inquiry], failed," Esta says, not allowing his voice to get any heavier or more solemn.  He is still Mariona's boss, whether she remembers it or not.  "I will essay the [Planar Binding], which for me is [6th]-circle."

12 minutes, perhaps, now remain until the tidal bore's arrival.

"Understood," Merrin says, without looking around, and continues not-looking. There are distant lines of white visible on the purple strip of sea, now, though still no sign of the vibration and roar of an incoming bore. 

...In her head, she's incrementing down the odds that the second spell works, and from there the likely update that nothing else will work either if it requires...interacting with places other than this planet?? Is that the implication? She has no idea of the mechanism by which the food-production spell or the healing work, whether they're...in some sense self-contained, a package transferred once from [god] to [cleric], or whether they do still draw on something somewhere else. 

It's not a certain update, of course. She understands the implication that [6th]-circle is a lot more powerful than [3rd]-circle, and maybe it just takes more power to interact with other places that are very very far? 

But if she had a prediction market up, the numbers would be updating downward. 

(Merrin was kiiiinda disappointed to realize that having two additional imaginary people in her head did not actually let her run imaginary prediction markets and remedy their lack in her life. Kalorm flat-out refuses to engage with the premise, mostly, and Laeirthe always complains that he has literally the exact same information as her so his bets would only very rarely be different than hers alone. Also, updating the market probabilities from bets is way too much math to do mentally.) 

...

...

...he can hear the tidal bore approaching.

This really ought to work, literally damn it.

He's trying to call a Sarglagon, this time.  Drowning devil.  Apt for water maneuvers, since he does not know the species of any devil that could simply divine the Bag's location.  Esta does not expect it to attack him over an Asmodeus-chosen spell even if it refuses aid, but should the devil attack, Esta also expects to win.  It ought to be troublesome to a 4th-circle, not to him.

This ought to work, yes, unless Yog-Sothoth yeeted you somewhere really far out of the way.

...

Welp.  Guess what 'exactly that' it looks like Yog-Sothoth did.

That was the outcome Asmodeus mostly predicted would happen.  But (1) there was still a fair prior probability it would work; (2) adapting default spell loadouts around that kind of detailed outcome prediction would cost intervention budget; and (3) a relatively less stupid lost squirrel sometimes works out that it is being commanded to report back to Hell and then figures out some way to do that even if the first try doesn't work.

"My [Planar Binding] has also failed."

"We are probably somewhere very far out of the way."

Oh. 

Merrin turns around and looks at him. 

"...How surprised and confused are you?" she says, after a moment. "Either that it didn't work, or that your [god] would have given it to you even when it wouldn't work? I don't...think I know how big a piece of - new bad information - this is...?" That was a clumsily and frankly kind of silly-sounding way to say the thing she means, but Merrin isn't feeling that inclined to spend five times as many words in her sentences trying to express what she could say in Baseline in a few words. 

"Surprised.  Not confused."

The incoming tidal bore is very loud, now.

Esta has no Divination to locate the Bag.

No Augury to say this will be safe.

No Inquiry, nor Inquiry-identified devil, to locate the Bag.

No drowning devil to perhaps help him search, or help him stay afloat.

"I think this outcome indicates that my [spell loadout] reflects my [deity] not being able to see me or hear me very well, rather than it being a [godchosen] [spell loadout] that was meant to guide me in detail along my way.  Either that, or I wholly failed to infer what was intended."

"...Which mostly amounts to the same thing, that we have no special information indicating that jumping in the tidal bore this morning will maximize the chances of finding the Bag, and on priors it's not an incredibly good idea," Merrin says, after a moment. "And we should - call it off, and figure out more safety measures if we're going to try this strategy at all?" 

Merrin is not SURE that her reasoning here is truth-tracking, as opposed to distorted by the fact that she's really stressed about Estha deliberately subjecting himself to the oceanic forces that nearly drowned him less than a planetary day ago. 

(Rescuing him from that was admittedly very cool and shiny – that is, after the fact, when everything was fine. Merrin is REALLY NOT AT ALL tempted to nudge him to do more dangerous things in order to have another medical emergency to treat. That would be Fucked Up.)

"If we are not being advised to this course by a [deity] then it is, in fact, stupid."

"Mission aborted.  We try this again -- not the next [day].  The [day] after, when there will be another tidal bore, and for that one I can have [Word of Recall] and maybe even [Locate Object] too; or else perhaps [Imbue with Spell Ability], to give you [Detect Magic] -- if I can successfully convey any requests to my [deity] at all."

"Otherwise... I suppose we climb down into this canyon and spend many days searching it, by sight and [Detect Magic] for as long as I have it."

“Okay. ...The next tidal bore will be in the dark, it's due half an hour after sunset tonight, but I can rig you up with more lighting by then." 

And she'll put away all the unburnt incense back in its containers (who knows, it might somehow manage to be useful for something, and Merrin certainly isn't throwing it away after the enormous amount of work she put into making it, even if that was half because she had literally nothing else to do with herself during the endless afternoons she was stuck indoors. They can dismantle the windbreak-canopy shelter and haul everything back 600 meters over the horrible terrain and head back into the shelter. 

...Which is warming up fairly quickly, actually, because Merrin's routine was disrupted and she didn't put the reflective tarp back the instant the sun was up, and so by the time they get back the sun has been up for nearly an hour and, even angled low in the sky, is gently warming the dark-pigmented, solar-radiation-absorbing seaweed weave and sailweed-leaf covering. (The shelter side of the sinkhole faces the sea and it gets morning direct sunlight and is in shadow in the afternoons, which is a bit of luck, the afternoons are when Merrin most needs to minimize heat input to the space.)

It's already above freezing inside! ...Like 0.5° C above freezing, but still. Merrin had been fretting a bit about whether Estha's weird-magic-fantasy-world armor would fail to protect him from frostbite in his extremities, even if it kept his core warm, and he probably shouldn't use his climate-protection [spells] yet when he doesn't yet know if he'll ever be able to get more. 

On arrival, Merrin keeps her own armor on for warmth but unseals the helmet so she can EAT MORE OF THE FOOD IT'S SO DELICIOUS. And then, oh right, she should probably do the partial-dismantling required to help Estha get out of his improvised flotation-""armor"", which is inconvenient to move around in. 

And then they...have a lot of time to plan. Like eight more hours of it until the point when Estha might or might not be able to [pray] for more [spells]. 

If they're neither searching the riverbed until lower tide, nor yet do they know whether Esta gets spells, then Esta does not see all that much to plan?  Though he will obviously participate in planning sessions, if Merrin's greater knowledge of the exoplanet leads her to see more opportunity for planning.

Esta's own instinctive use for cognition will be to ponder the implications of recent events, and what they say about how much overdetermining-god-optimization Y̷̼̚o̷̪͒g̵͚̋-̴͕͠S̸͚̀ǫ̵͆t̸̥̾h̵̺̋o̴̜̕t̴͚͝ĥ̵̟ has exerted over their setup, and to what visible or guessable ends.  Esta also remembers the advice of Cultural Adaptation to occasionally show what he is feeling on his face, else Merrin find it suspicious otherwise.

He looks quite grim.

Merrin is not grimmer than usual! Merrin has had six planetary months to absorb her situation, and her situation is not, in fact, worse than it was before, if it turns out Estha getting [spells] from his [god] was a one-time thing. They'll die eventually, probably, but with each other for company, which from Merrin's perspective right now is almost certainly better than not that. And their chances are better even if Estha never gets another [spell], she thinks? He's got his [belt] so he can keep up with her; they can do construction projects and exploration projects that would be too difficult or dangerous solo! Feeding both of them on local biomass will be an enormous hassle but not, necessarily, intractable... 

And maybe he will get [spells] again! It seems odd to Merrin that his [god] would be able to transmit those exactly once? Like, low confidence because she has no idea how anything works, but what would even be the mechanism of that?

She is going to do her very best to eat all of the food that Estha made for her, since she was warned it won't be good anymore after 24 hours (and, given that it's magic, she's dubious that attempting to frantically freeze-dry or pickle it before that interval elapses will even help.) A Merrin full of (relatively) delicious calories is a Merrin in a much better mood than her average over recent months.

She should probably, at some point, do her own pondering on the larger situation – it's such a weird situation! – but she has no idea how to get any further on making inferences unless she jumps headfirst into the Narrative Trope Logic and she is not quite resigned to that yet. 

Productive logistics planning she can make progress on now: starting to map out plans for riverbed-searching, under various assumptions including "no more [spells] ever, just Detect Magic", in which case they need to time it for both low tide and times of day when being outside without shelter or climate-protection won't be immediately lethal. 

(Also, unless Estha interrupts her to object, she'll get out her shelter repair kit - which includes sewing materials as well as a lot of other materials - and start fixing his clothes; it hasn't occurred to her that this would be a good use of a [spell] even if he gets more, since she wasn't actually aware they had any magical features, and in any case she can at least get him something repaired enough to be wearable-for-warm in less than eight hours.) 

Sewing will not interfere with a later repair spell; if she wishes to attempt that much work in the face of its probable futility, she is welcome to do that.  (Esta has never before seen Mariona do it; but he is aware that many other women have been so made as to find spinning, sewing, and tailoring more relaxing than simply doing nothing.)

He weighs for a long time, and carefully, whether to say what he is about to say.

"There's a proverb that goes, to understand the meaning of a [divine intervention], look at the counterfactual for what would have happened otherwise."

"I have now seen enough of this planet to appreciate more viscerally that most places here are not places where a tidal bore is about to hit, right next to Merrin, who is wearing her armor and knows how to deal with tidal bores, and can take me back to her safe base to recover.  The [Outer God] that sent us here, sent me to a moment where I would lose my [Holding Bag], but not ultimately die.  It accomplished this by sending me here four months after you arrived, with time to build your base.  It would not even have been as much of a guess as I am accustomed to it being for our own [god]; because in this place, unlike the planet I remember, it should be possible for an [Outer God] to directly observe the future."

"If my Bag would have sufficed to get us out of here, quickly, then the [Outer God] wanted for that to not happen.  Straightforward, in a way.  We understand little of the different motivations of the different [Outer Gods] that are not simply and directly lethal to us; but from our own perspective, Their interventions sometimes seem to play out like bizarre games, if they are not simply and entirely inscrutable.  If the [Outer God] can want to play a game with us, It can want that game to not end in its first [day]."

"And if that is what It wants, and It can see the future and we can't, It is liable to get what It wants and not what we want."