And, of course, it's straightforward enough why one would have to separate Merrin from her context. The entirety of Civilization would absolutely apply worldoptimization to problems, and also there's the fact that Merrin seems to need a remarkable amount of quite specific kinds of pressure in order to behave much like a standard dath ilani protagonist. 

That's kind of rude. 

Well, it's true. 

You know, Laeirthe noticing something. He is perhaps getting the sense that Estha was in many ways a much more normal person than Merrin. As in, one who would do protagonist-y things under somewhat less immense coercion from external narrative forces. 

- it's not a complete thought, it turns out, Laeirthe does not have the rest of it all neatly reasoned through, just - noticing, confusion. Is Estha behaving more like a typical dath ilani protagonist than Merrin is, so far? 

Well, maybe he's doing all sorts of protagonist internal monologue that Merrin just does not get to observe! But...not really, no.

Which on the one hand makes perfect sense, since he claims not to be dath ilani at all, and on the other hand that...does seem like kind of a fundamental trait to remove from someone? Most alternateuniverse versions of protagonists are just as...protagonist-y...as the originals. 

...She doesn't know what to do with that either. 

This might be as much useful reasoning as they can do in this framework. Merrin seems to be wearing herself out with it. 

So. Advancepredictions from the Narrative Tropes Theory: maybe Estha's alternateuniverse setting has really intractable problems, and Estha has his own in-story reasons for not telling her, but the narrative reason is that as soon as she finds out that will immediately become the entire plot.

Which...implies that Someone wants there to be a different plot, first?

...There seems to be a through-line here of Merrin needing to take solo responsibility for more and more things, with the attendant character growth? First keeping herself alive, then saving Estha, then the whole uncertainty-and-social-deception thing, and after that...something. Laeirthe is not going to try to guess what. 

But he is going to register a possible hypothesis that the win state of the game being played, here, is one where Merrin becomes a fucking protagonist. 

Wow, it's a good thing this entire reasoning framework is silly and absurd and not particularly valid logic to back up her decisionmaking, and so Merrin doesn't have to make very much of an update, because she hates it so much

- hypothesis noted. 

...Merrin does, for some reason, feel in some unclear way better after all of that. Less quicksand-y.

Maybe it's just that Merrin’s dath ilani training is doing its job, and the state of knowing there are thoughts she hasn’t thought yet out of the worry that they’ll have conclusions she doesn’t like, is actually a more uncomfortable state than just having the thoughts already, registering the conclusions that she indeed doesn’t like, and moving the fuck on with her life.

She’s got logistics to do. 

But first: more sleep. 

They miss tonight's tidal bore (it swept past a little before sunset, before Merrin woke the first time.) The tides are 35 hours apart, so the next one will be after Esta's spells are renewed. 

That's fine. It'll give them a chance to test Word of Recall on a middle-of-the-night walk. It's going to have to be the middle of the night, because each planetary day fits 2 2/3 prayer-cycle "days", and 24 hours after Estha's last one will fall at 06:00 local time, with planetary-dawn not until 13:00.

It works!!!

The next tidal bore is due at 24:45 in the morning.

Day 44 since Merrin's arrival. Nearly two planetary days since Estha joined her, though not quite, he showed up in the afternoon. 

The tidal bore happens to fall during one of the brief twice-a-day windows where the outside air temperature is an even vaguely comfortable room temperature. Not that it matters - two hours ago it was still unpleasantly cold and two hours from now it'll be back in heatstroke-risk-with-any-exertion territory, and so Merrin has Endure Elements and Estha has Planetary Adaptation. 

Merrin is not accompanying him. 

The tradeoff: if she's in the tidal bore with him, she has a chance of getting to him if he's injured before he can cast Word of Recall.

But they judged that was quite unlikely. Estha has some kind of toughness that isn't just stamina, clearly, based on the fact that he stayed conscious for minutes after being hit the last time; being knocked unconscious in less than six seconds seems remotely unlikely. Word of Recall has no gesture component and only requires speaking, which he can do with an air supply.

(Merrin had more lead time, and his bubbleflotationsuit has been Improved with the addition of a helmet faceplate, so he can breathe normally rather than having to try to speak with a scuba regulator in his mouth. It's not nearly as good as the helmet on her own suit, which is a nearly-unbreakable plastic composite; Merrin doesn't have reshapeable hard plastics in her gear, and was stuck with sealing a double layer of the clear plastic sheeting over a stiff wire frame. It's recessed from the inflated padding tubes forming the "helmet", though, and it shouldn't be the first part of the bubbleflotationsuit to fail on impact.) 

Anyway: if Estha gets into trouble, and uses Word of Recall to teleport back to the shelter, and Merrin is not at that moment touching him, then - they're out of luck, because Merrin will shortly be kilometers upstream, and Estha will be back in her shelter, and it's not impossible he could at that point be too injured to cast Heal on himself, a spell which does require a gesture. 

The other constraint is that Estha is the one who has the geography-knowledge spell, but Merrin is going to be the one maintaining their map. 

Merrin is going to be really proud of her map once it, like, properly exists. Right now most of what she has is still raw video footage and audio notes-to-herself that she has not, actually, had enough downtime to review in enough detail to turn into anything more visual-map-like. And she's going to have to, because it seems that Estha's spell gives him a trove of local-geography knowledge that he can easily reach for - the same way the language spell gives Merrin vocabulary - but it does not, actually, install mapping software to his brain. 

And the mapping software is going to be important, because it has an option to give you a search-algorithm, with a set of variables to enter (stuff like “how many bystanders are helping Merrin search for [insert mission objective here]” and “how many meters of visibility do they have”), and a bunch more that come preset for her usual Exception Handling scenarios but, she’s pretty sure, are reprogrammable. Merrin will dredge math out of her brain that she learned and forgot when she was 14, and she will figure out how to adjust her search-pattern software for things like “the thing we’re looking for will move every 35 hours” and maybe more sophisticated modeling of how likely it is to move from exposed versus stable locations, and she will make this program, designed for recruiting and directing ilani bystanders to find a person buried in a snow-avalanche or whatever, spit out the MOST OPTIMAL plan to search for the stupid Bag.

Look, the tropes are in her favor, because this is a dath ilani protagonist thing to do (this logic is dubious and also, like, it's not a protagonist thing to do so much as a generic dath ilani thing to do.)  

But it’s going to be pretty intractable if Merrin has the software, and Estha is the one running the search-pattern, and they can’t TALK while he’s out. And also the map mostly doesn’t exist yet, and to exist properly it still needs inputs from Estha’s brain, which Estha will most easily be able to access while searching.

And, like, 90% of that is premature optimization because they do not, in fact, know if Estha’s janky flotation-armor bubblesuit will actually let him speed 18 kilometers upstream in minutes. 

But it’s STILL important that they be able to communicate, and it does not seem like any of Estha’s economicmagic spell options offer as much bandwidth at as little cost as, you know. Radios.

Merrin has two handheld radios, paired to each other and the transmitter-receiver in her power armor. They have a range of up to 10 kilometers under ideal conditions. Their search-radius is bigger than that. 

Merrin, via a long interlude of mental design-work in her nighttime insomnia period and then a heads-down couple of morning hours of reprogramming components, was able to kludge together a more powerful radio transmitter, powered from her main battery and with an antenna directly above her sinkhole "roof", a local high point on the terrain. On Estha's end, receiving her signal is easy – the range on the handheld radios is limited by transmission power, not what they can pick up – but she won't be able to receive responses from him once he's out of his transmission range. 

BUT: his stupid bubblesuit already has the directional beacon built into it, which (theoretically) has a significantly higher transmission range than the handheld radio set (at the cost of a much larger and heavier battery, and still having a shorter battery life). And it turns out that the beacon does have some reprogrammable software components, and Merrin is now pretty sure that she's both reprogrammed it correctly and taught this new, tech-illiterate Estha how to use it, such that he can trigger two preset signals, either "I can't get back, come find me now" or "everything is fine." 

If this works - and assuming they don't find the Bag literally today, but Merrin is at this point mostly expecting that they won't - then she'll keep iterating and figure out more return signals so he can actually, like, tell her things about the terrain. 

(If it doesn't work, she'll also keep iterating. Just, you know, probably on different elements.)

So: staying behind. 

Mildly freaking out, because she SURE DID pull an unconscious Estha out of the river post-tidal-bore like 1.5 planetary days ago, and this time she's not even trying to be close enough to catch up, and he's the only other sapient being on this ENTIRE PLANET and also, like, he is very snuggleable, and even though he might or might not in one sense or another be the same person as her boyfriend, Merrin is attached and emotionally invested and she cares significantly more about him than she would about a completely random fellow human, which to be clear would already be quite a lot of caring-about, because Merrin really does not like it when people die EVEN WHEN CRYO IS AVAILABLE and this stupid exoplanet does not even have that contingency.

Merrin is definitely not letting her mild freakout emotions influence her decisions or her prioritization or her externally visible behavior or her body language, because Merrin is a trained Exception Handling medtech, and she may never have been incentivized to learn to hide her little dance of joy when a patient unexpectedly improves, but she has absolutely been trained not to let her stress and anxiety leak out at everyone else. 

(This might or might not be enough to successfully conceal her feelings from someone whose training data consisted of Chelish people. But Merrin is, relative to most Chelish people, probably both trying harder and better equipped to defuse her stress and anxiety at the source, rather than just being terrified while not letting it show in her facial expressions. Internal feelings still affect implicit second-to-second prioritization and judgement, and she needs those to be in working order.) 

Esta casts Locate Object, and then, jumps directly into a tidal bore!

He's not nervous, on account of this not being even in the top twenty most dangerous things he's ever done.  Possibly the first time, with no Word of Recall, and no way to retrieve his body for resurrection, would make the top twenty occasions.  But this?  No.

He doesn't flinch as he jumps, because while he did get beaten bloody and finally drowned by the previous tidal bore, it wasn't all that painful per se.  You've got to be able to walk into much more predictably painful gauntlets than that, without a betraying hitch in your step.

Merrin is back at the shelter and does not have a good view of anything, even standing on the highest-ground point, beside her solar panel array and newly-improvised radio antenna (made entirely out of the dual-purpose tent poles that she no longer needs for portable shelter, now that she has Endure Elements.) 

STRESS STRESS STRESS what if Estha breaks all of his fingers!!!!! Merrin could not figure out a great way of giving him bubble-padding protection for his hands that would not, itself, directly interfere with the gesture-spell-component for locating objects or detecting magic.

(This is apparently not usually an enormous problem? Because [clerics] at 6th-[circle] are super hard to injure and do not seem to have normal human biology? And, like, he's expecting it this time, he can probably just tuck his hands in, and also, importantly, the Word of Recall spell doesn't require a gesture and so, at worst, Merrin will have to do normal medicine the hard way until his weird augmented nonhuman biology fixes his hands enough that he can fix himself the rest of the way. You know, given how that's more or less exactly what happened the last time, with much less preparation on Estha's part, and also a ton of unnecessary stress on Merrin's part because he totally wasn't going to die?) 

STRESS STRESS STRESS nope shutting all of that down, it will not help, Merrin is a trained Exception Handling medtech and panicking literally never helps, she is calm, this is fine, they have a plan, they have like six layers of contingency plans, she's just here with the radio and ready to provide medical care and she is calm and fine - 

...um.

Okay.  Taking into account your giant insulating bubble suit, and that you did let the first primary wave go past you before jumping, and that it's a fucking tidal bore...

Let's call this a DC 15 Swim check, STR-based, unskilled possible, to avoid 1d3 nonlethal damage?  And if you fail by 5 or more, take 1d4 lethal damage instead.  Owing to the insulated suit, you'll only hit the surface rocks every two rounds, rather than getting tumbled into a new underwater impact every round.  Your STR is 10.

If you check that once per two rounds, starting from 87 hit points, it'd last you...

...around 60 rounds = 6 minutes, according to simulation?  During which time you'd travel 6km if you were going an average of 10 m/s, taking into account all the side motion and impacts.

"Continuing to take regular minor damage, cumulation significant, despite the armor and despite staying above water.  I would guess I have around 5 [minutes] before I should [Word of Recall] back, in order to not even slightly risk unconsciousness.  I'll continue to run Locate Object, but mostly I think this version of the plan is not proving sufficiently efficient."

"Acknowledged."

Merrin, standing on top of the hill beside her solar panels and radio antenna, cannot actually see Estha at all – all she knows is that he's clearly still within the handheld-radio transmitter range. And, in fact, unlikely to get far enough away from her to need to fall back on the beacon transmitter at all, assuming his suit stays intact enough to hold air and he relatedly stays at the surface. 

The problem is maneuverability, it sounds like, or rather the lack thereof, and Estha's lack of extremely specific Exception Handling training for defensive swimming in hostile water conditions. Merrin is great at dodging rocks in her armor, and would in fact not be particularly nervous about doing exactly what Estha is doing right now without a way to teleport back. ("Not particularly nervous" should not be taken to imply this is safe, or in any way a good idea, just that it's the kind of thing that she's gotten inured to on this stupid ridiculous planet and can no longer muster any actual anxiety about. Honestly, Merrin has always been less prone to anxiety and quicker to become desensitized when it's about a physical hazard; most of her neuroticism ends up pointed at objectively-lower-stakes social interactions, because her brain is very silly.) 

The beacon is helpfully letting her track his approximate location on her screen. Merrin will transmit about once per minute, to to update him on where he is relative to the numbered cave-openings, which did make it onto a paper map even if the cave interiors haven't yet. And wait for him to Word of Recall back, hopefully with his fingers sufficiently intact to fix his injuries...

...Merrin can ABSOLUTELY manage to be stressed about this on Estha's behalf, even though she's pretty sure that this is not even something he's seeing as a big deal, just a minor inconvenience.

(Would Merrin be that chill about actual broken bones if she knew she had the ability to heal herself right away afterward? Maybe you just end up used to it? It's pretty hard to imagine getting used to something like that - and it's particularly hard to imagine with Estha, whose dath ilani version is absolutely not a masochist.) 

(After a minute or two she’ll slip back down into the shelter. She’s not actually getting much value out of staring at the river channel, and she set the radio up so she can use it either inside or outside. Endure Elements, unlike Estha’s Planetary Adaptation, does not actually make her immune to sunburn.)

Around the first time he feels tempted to close his eyes, he shall just go ahead and leave the tidal bore instead.  They do teach even Asmodeans, who must face combat, that just because you can continue in the face of pain does not make this the tactically wisest move under every set of circumstances.

Word of Recall.

It takes him back to the sanctuary's interior, as is the only place on the planet that he could claim to be very familiar with.

Merrin is there waiting for him! She made sure there was a nice clear space in the middle, so he doesn't knock any of her stuff over when he appears from thin air. 

She’ll hang back for a moment to see if he immediately heals himself, rather than get in his personal space, but will try to get a quick visual assessment of how badly injured he looks and, especially, how badly mangled the bubbleflotationsuit looks after cushioning him from dozens of violent impacts, and whether it’s repairable with her supplies or might require the spell that fixes broken things. Merrin literally does not possess enough waterproof plastic sheeting to make another suit, so they’ll need to keep this one in working order one way or another.

He's got a few grotesquely twisted broken bones, some open bleeding wounds including on his head.  Nothing serious, he mostly protected his hands successfully.  He did immediately fall over after teleporting in.

The suit's gonna need a Make Whole, yeah.