Merrin doesn’t think that he went from able to cast a spell to unconscious within six seconds, probably? And her instincts are actually finding it convincingly reassuring that he was way more seriously messed up than this after the first river encounter and even then his vital signs were completely fine the entire time. She’s kind of upset because that looks really, really painful and she can infer that he was enduring being bounced and jostled around the river with those broken bones, but she’s not really alarmed.

She will hover and give him thirty seconds before she starts asking if he needs her to provide medical care to get him to the point that he can cast healing spells. 

No, he's actually just taking a couple of rounds to collect himself after all the concussions, before he bulls past a couple of arm-breaks, to put his fingers in the right position to cast 6th-circle magic.  Like, he could try to do that immediately, but he doesn't have backup healing magic and it's not combat-urgent and it is not always tactically correct to optimize entirely around proving your Asmodean pain tolerance.

Heal.

"This plan is going to need some additional steps."

One [day] later, planetary afternoon, after managing to add one more spell to his loadout by concentrating on that throughout his prayer.

Imbue With Spell Ability:  Detect Magic.

Merrin has been genuinely excited and eagerly anticipating this! 

...Without really intending it, she's finding herself paying quite a lot of attention to whether there's any feeling of familiarity, of this being something she once had in her own right, of the slightest trace of existing procedural memory for the ability to slot into. 

...For Laeirthe there is absolutely a feeling of recognition and relief and having an ability back. This is clearly fully explained by the fact that Laeirthe's autobiographical memories, such as they are, are of a story in a setting where he had the equivalent of at-will [Detect Magic] at all times. 

He does not think this is any evidence at all that Merrin once had this ability, and forgot it along with the memories of her entire life. He's definitely not catching any obvious signs of familiarity from her. 

It's not very strong evidence of anything one way or another, of course, but - it's an observation to note. 

It's late afternoon now, actually only six hours or so before Estha is due to pray yet again; there's not going to be a tidal bore at all in this window, high tide was at 36:00, and they've been waiting for hours for the water level to be low enough that one of the more nearby and accessible caves, that she’s put particular effort into mapping from Estha’s geography-knowledge, is only partly flooded and should be safely navigable by an armored Merrin.

So they’re doing the test on the riverbank right above the mouth of said cave, so Merrin can go right in and swim-slash-climb as far as she possibly can in the mapped direction before the spell runs out.

She was warned that the spell would take ongoing concentration to maintain for its full maximum duration, which is only twelve minutes. And also she’s not sure yet that she knows how to tell for sure that it’s still up or whether she lost it if she’s not in range of anything visibly magical.

She’s going to allow herself thirty seconds to practice concentrating on it without the additional cognitive burden of swimming in a half-flooded cave, and she’s going to use it to look at Estha’s magical possessions, because it’s useful practice for her new sensory modality and also she’s so curious.

It seems like the correct time to lend Merrin his other Ring, in fact.  It's not much of a magic item by the standards of the mighty, but its faint divination aura reflects that it will add +3 to Perception checks, and sometimes that bare edge matters in palace politics.

If she stops seeing the magic from that ring, it means she's lost the spell.

Esta's armor is magical and abjuration; his vestments below that, magical and abjuration; his other ring, faint conjuration; his belt, transmutation; his back-of-head-headband, much stronger transmutation.

SHINY

Awwwwww, wow, Merrin had not realized that Laeirthe could even do positive emotions that loud. 

It IS really, really cool! Not that she has a great sense of how to interpret the details she's picking up, but - there's so much there! Structure and complexity and intricate pattern, vaguely reminiscent of those cool mathematical visualizations which Merrin often does not super understand but can still enjoy staring at. 

...Now is not the time to ask Estha any of the five thousand questions about how his spells work that her brain will definitely generate now. Somehow she...hadn't thought to be curious about it on an intellectual level, before? Also, possibly a lot of her urgent burning curiosity is...not entirely native, it's not that Merrin has zero intellectual curiosity for its own sake but the Laeirthe model is really accentuating it. 

Well. If they are in fact going to be doing this for the next planetary month, maybe there will be opportunities to have some nerdy conversations about it. Proooobably Estha won't object to explaining just how the spells work, if Merrin isn't being pushy about details of how she went around using them in her alternate-universe life. 

Burning desperate curiosity is a protagonist trait, right, the tropes are on her side shut up, Merrin's brain. 

She jumps into the water - it's moving out to sea, but not that fast - and she swims into the cave. 

Are those...limestone-dissolving chemotroph biofilms? They're obviously not plants!! There's no light in here!! And Merrin can't see what they could be metabolizing other than rock – there are different kinds of fungus-like growths in corners where rotting debris accumulated, but in this particular stretch, the weird thick drippy ropy films are clinging directly to the walls and ceiling. 

Merrin cannot imagine what this cave would smell like if she weren't wearing a suit with a sealed air supply. But she's not a very squeamish person in general, and mostly she finds it INCREDIBLY COOL. 

Mental note: doing this with the cave half-flooded was a good call. It's actually a lot easier to move if she's mostly swimming, rather than walking on all that slime. ...The current is against her, which is pretty annoying, but the tidal water pooling in this cave system is not actually draining out that fast, and the current can be resisted. 

The cave does not try very hard to murder Merrin at all! She only finds one pocket that sets off her radioactivity alarm. It would be incredibly easy to get lost if she did not have built-in navigation software, but she does, and her suit will remember exactly which way she came, and if she needs to she can literally replay the video footage in reverse on her wrist console. 

She can maintain concentration on the spell through a distraction level of "noticing cool things", and even a radioactivity alarm that isn't incredibly unexpected or surprising and thus does not really startle her. She will probably lose it after seven minutes, though, when the "ground" vanishes under her feet and a surprisingly fast and powerful current is abruptly trying to pull her directly downward. 

AAAAAWHATTHE - 

- oh, it's just a fork in the cave system and the tidal water - or possibly an underground river mixing with tidal water, the salinity is lower than expected - is mostly going down the lower branch, because gravity, and the sheer narrowness of that passage is accelerating the current. 

Merrin can't see the magic ring anymore, which means she's lost the spell, and at this point can dedicate all of her attention to not getting sucked down a riverhole that had not made it onto her sketchy map. 

It's fine. She's fine. The current is really nothing compared to the tidal bore, it just caught her a bit by surprise, but she has more than enough swimming-mode power assist to fight it. 

Why doesn't she just go back now. Carefully. And they can find out if replaying the video footage for Estha lets him hone in on the right part of his temporarily implanted geography-knowledge to inform her where that goes. Presumably it exits, at some point, back into the tidal channel? And they will at some point have to explore it, but once they're better prepared... 

No Bag. 

Merrin pops back out of the cave about twelve minutes after she entered it - the return journey was with the current, and faster - and has to explain, with significant embarrassment, that she dropped [Detect Magic] barely halfway through its maximum duration when a riverhole with a fast current unexpectedly tried to swallow her.

Probably she can get better at maintaining concentration on it with more practice? And she's not hurt, and hasn't picked up any damage to her power armor, so overall this basic strategy seems workable? Moreso than Estha getting all of his limbs smashed to buy them 5-6 minutes of search time.

(Merrin has not brought up that this was actually quite upsetting for her even if he was fine minutes later, but she has perhaps not succeeded at perfectly hiding the reaction.)

It's just that searching all of the caves this way would be really really slow, and if only Merrin can go in safely then there might be places she literally can't get to from the outside inside of twelve minutes, and so they'd better keep iterating. 

There are other spells he can request of his [god].  Going through those requests one to a day is what's slowing them down, but there are plenty more things to try.

Esta is still using Tongues and Cultural Adaptation once per day, and he has picked up the general impression that sane people do not fuck around with the 'radioactivity' business.  How about if today's keeping of Heal is expended on Merrin, who has been to a cave that has supposedly not set off her radiation detectors?

Actually, at some point after testing Greater Make Whole on other Dark Tapestry artifacts 'dath ilani technology', they should apply it to Merrin's allegedly nonmagical armor.  In case some part of it has spontaneously stopped working, as 'technology' sometimes does.  Some part like the 'radioactivity' detectors, for example.

(There are in fact things in Golarion that sound as scary as radioactivity sounds in Baseline, treated as seriously as Cultural Adaptation says a dath ilani should treat 'radioactivity'.  Shoggoths, for example.  Or Lilitu.  Cheliax takes those about as seriously as dath ilan takes 'radioactivity' from sources like 'radon'.  Such are the hazards of trying to match cross-cultural scales of danger based on prioritized concern; some cultures do in fact have worse things to worry about than others.)

....Awww, it's kind of sweet when Estha is being protective of her. And, honestly, Merrin has been getting perhaps a bit excessively blasé about the radiation exposure. It was just...hard to feel that bothered on an instinctive level about exposures that might statistically increase her odds of cancer in a decade, when she almost certainly wasn't going to make it through the planetary year. 

She should probably fill him in a bit on the actual risk profile for exposure to radioactivity at various doses, especially because sending him into the caves with his higher-range object-locating spell and unlimited magic-detection would speed up their search a lot but she does not think she can give him as much protection as her suit provides. Merrin does not super understand the specs of his healing spells, but if any of the damage and symptoms sound like something that Heal wouldn’t get then that’s very important to know. On the bright side, even a significant radiation injury - even a level of exposure that would eventually be fatal without healing spells - is unlikely to prevent him from casting spells. Honestly, the ambient radiation from rocks with a lot of uranium ore content is just massively less dangerous than, say, a nuclear reactor exploding, which is improbable to quite a lot of zeroes after the decimal but is nonetheless an emergency-response training that Merrin has done a few times.

She’s pretty sure her radiation sensor is working fine but she won’t decline an offer to use his fixing-things spell on her armor, if he’s offering. It’s definitely going to be suffering from gradual subtle deterioration in various components that she doesn’t have replacements for, and pre-emptively restoring it to optimal condition makes it less likely one of the systems will fail on her at a bad time, for example when she’s a twelve-minute swim deep in a cave and needs the map to find her way out again.

They can test it on her IV-pump assembly first, after she reassembles it with all the broken components she took out of other equipment when she replaced them with cannibalized components from the pump. She does not actually need or have all that much use for a lightweight power-efficient portable IV pump that can run up to twelve infusions and connect wirelessly to her suit console, but if it’s fixed, then she can start taking it apart a second time and have that much more runway on critical parts that she can’t manufacture from scratch.

Does it work? 

Ummm...

So in principle, Greater Make Whole does specify that it works on 'technological items' (and 'otherwise' works like Make Whole, which implies that Make Whole doesn't work on technology, despite the lack of any such specification in Make Whole).

RAW, this works.  But RAI, there's a question whether arbitrary scifi-themed Dark Tapestry artifacts count as 'technology'.

Creation thinks they need a ruling from the larger Universe on this one.

Whoa whoa whoa, why wouldn't our stuff count as 'technology'?  Literally all products of dath ilan are made from 100% natural atoms!  There shouldn't be anything extra or weird about repairing a dath ilani object compared to repairing any other object.

Greater Make Whole doesn't specify that it fails on unique creations like paintings, so it has to be reading from the object's past state rather than comparing to an idealized extrapolated blueprint or to similar intact items elsewhere.

Repairing Merrin's armor should just work.  There's no reason to get the local multiverse involved in this.

If 'Greater Make Whole' worked on anything made of atoms it would work on creatures.  There may be some implied limit on the complexity of those atoms, and biochemistry, for example, might be over that limit.  Or integrated circuits with submicron feature sizes.

Like poo are your creatures made exclusively out of atoms.  They have hitpoints.