Cultural Adaptation suggests that a proverb already exists about this!  Esta rather likes the formulation of it.

"'It's okay to be imperfect, so long as you're not so imperfect that other people notice.'  I haven't noticed your judgment being any worse than usual.  There was that time you tried to continue swimming past the point where you were taking enough damage per [moment] that it was clearly not going to work out, but that's... actually very characteristic of the Merrin I know and not suggestive of new bad judgment."

If anything Merrin seems to have a solidity about her that Mariona lacked, but it would not be in Esta's interests to observe this.

What a normal reassuring Estha-from-dath-ilan thing to say! If only Merrin could feel reassured by it instead of vaguely unsettled! 

"....Yeah, that was an error." A REALLY EMBARRASSING one, too. "I diagnosed it afterward as - updating on the way you asked if I was still mission-capable, toward feeling like keeping-going was the default and I should be able to keep going, which is obviously invalid reasoning and I think I'll be able to catch myself next time. ...I'm not used to you being the one who's - less cautious isn't the thing - it's probably because the you I remember wasn't in Exception Handling with me and our relationship was - one where I'd expect you to be a bit overprotective? And I wasn't accounting for the part where - hmm, so it seems like even apart from the [Belt]'s effects, you...don't quite have the normal human biology that I'm familiar with? You're injured less severely by the same impacts, and I think you improve faster even without [healing spells], and - am I right in guessing that the me you remember also has some of that? My own memories are of having normal human biology, so I think I might become impaired by injuries more quickly than you were modeling, does that fit?" 

He files away the point that alter-Mariona expects him to be 'overprotective' to try to fit into some kind of coherent sense later.

"...If all of your [vitality] has been stripped away from you, then you were in far more danger, attempting that, than I had begun to suspect.  And your exosuit more protective, if you survived."

"[Negative levels] can partially strip away [vitality] temporarily and revocably.  [Status] might detect them, [Death Ward] would suppress them for [minutes].  But I already-seem-to-know-and-predict-in-my-heart that those [spells] will detect nothing and suppress nothing.  If the [Outer God] simply -- stripped away your [vitality], in the process of rewriting you -- that is terrifying even by [Dark Tapestry] standards."

Okay!!! It seems like they totally in fact failed to be on the same page about a really important thing!!!!!

(Merrin is very briefly tempted to be embarrassed about it, and catches herself, because if her first response to successfully noticing the really important thing is a negative one then she will implicitly be punishing her brain for having thought of it, and she knows better, and she has significantly more important priorities here than feeling stupid.) 

"My suit is very well designed for what it does," she agrees. "And - I absolutely wouldn't have tried that without [healing spells] and someone to rescue me," and, you know, the fact that she still feels like the default outcome is dying trapped on an exoplanet, which shifts her degree of risk-aversion significantly, "but - I think I'd've put 90%, maybe 95%, odds of being fine if I hadn't been dragging you, because I just wouldn't hit anything? It sounds like you were modeling me as having less situation-relevant skill than I do, and just more generic physical toughness, but - I wasn't injured when I went in after you the time you were unconscious, I have a lot of training in more or less that exact thing, actually, rescuing injured people in hostile water conditions, that might be the single hazard-scenario I've trained on the most. I just wasn't used to the hydrodynamics of pulling you on a rope and failed to compensate." 

Subtext: Merrin does NOT think the correct update for him to make here is that she's strictly less capable than he thought! That seems like the wrong update, and one that might incorrectly lead him to rule out plans that would in fact work. Also it would make her sad, she doesn't want him to feel like she's less capable than he thought she was and be disappointed in her for not being his Merrin-version

In the back of her mind, she's quietly making a mental note that Estha seems pretty thoroughly surprised and alarmed by the revelation about her normal human biology, whereas to Merrin it's entirely unsurprising and just obviously how it would work in an alternate-universe scenario. 

(She's still not saying anything to him about that, apparently. Because she's uneasy, for reasons she can't pin down but that Laeirthe thinks she should provisionally listen to even if she can't lay them out in logic - and, like, he's not wrong that her judgement is constantly working like that, she often has a really hard time verbalizing the logic behind her intuitive judgements, it's super annoying but it doesn't mean her judgement is wrong in those situations - anyway, she...somehow feels like it might destabilize something, here, to push back too hard on alternate-Estha's current hypothesis that she shares some kind of meaningful continuity of self with his Merrin. And since there are all these things neither of them wants to talk about, if she does destabilize their current working relationship, she's not sure that talking about it longer would even fix it.) 

"It's not so much a question of what you can sometimes do successfully, as a question of how quickly you die if something goes wrong, Merrin."

Yeah okay it's possible she is perhaps a bit defensive. However, remind her which of them it was again who had to be dragged out of the river unconscious and not breathing, and which of them was doing the rescuing that is not a productive thing to argue about. How much is her problem right now just that Kalorm is pissed off that someone is lecturing her for doing something dangerous? That's not helpful. Shut up, Kalorm. Merrin thinks people are allowed to care about her risking her life! That's a normal thing to care about even if it also prompts some defensiveness!

"...Yes. It's pretty important that I don't have extra [vitality]," what a weird concept, "and I'll die more quickly," a NORMAL AMOUNT of quickly, "if something goes wrong. But at the impact speeds we're dealing with, the armor will prevent any impact from actually crushing my skull or snapping my cervical spine even if I take an impact really badly, it's specced to let me jump out of a plane without a parachute and land in water." Admittedly not for jumping out of a plane and landing in a tidal bore full of rocks, Exception Handling only ever let her do that over open ocean. "And I think those are the only injuries that would kill me outright in less than a minute?"

Which is a lot longer than it should take him to yank her out.

"...It was stupid of me not to make sure you already knew how to get me out of the armor if I couldn't help, including dealing with mechanical damage," she admits, after a two-second pause. "That was my mistake and I apologize." 

"Ah.  Yes.  Of course you would be accepting final responsibility for that failure, since you are a trained Exception Handler, and Estha is an untrained civilian.  I, of course, consider myself to be Merrin's commander and the one person who was responsible for checking off items like that before starting the operation.  It doesn't speak that well of either of us, really, if we both considered ourselves to be in charge, and neither of us managed to get it done."  (...Esta says, because dath ilan yelled loudly there about not just accepting his subordinate's apology as his due, and then considering his own failures on his own.)

"Some of this is down to issues of trust.  Not just lacking trust, but wanting more of it.  I was curious about whatever unknown, useful, dangerous capability had casually sliced off my magical [armor], as should have been far beyond Merrin's [spells].  I did not ask you how it worked, because, you see, that might have seemed suspicious to you, or so I feared."

Oh no the conversation grew spikes. Not literally but that's always how it feels, when she says something that she thinks is...appropriately ceding ground or de-escalatory or whatever she was even trying to do there...and instead of a response in kind, she gets complications. 

(Merrin is pretty used to apologizing for mistakes and having the person she's apologizing to immediately retort that it was not solely her responsibility. She does it all the time! She sometimes kind of wishes that once in a while someone would just agree and move on, because she has NOT managed to entirely get over the thing where someone pointing out that they had final responsibility for the thing makes her feel like they're claiming she wasn't competent enough to be trusted with it alone, yes she's aware that's very silly, it nonetheless still stings a tiny bit, someday she'll sort out her neuroticism the rest of the way and get over it. ...However, it sure would have startled and confused her if that had been Estha's response in this moment.) 

Okay. Untangle it, quickly, before she's been staring at him long enough that it gets awkward.

She really doesn't think she's been treating him like an untrained civilian! She would not have agreed to drag untrained-civilian-Estha on roller skates in a tidal bore! But she's been clearly doing some stupid combination of - half treating him like her Exception Handling supervisor, the analogous thing to whatever alternate-Estha is to alternate-Merrin, because she so, so badly wants there to be an adult in the room who isn't her - and also, yeah, not fully trusting him and being suspicious. 

"Well, I think our current policy is that we're not avoiding having me explain dath ilan to you for infohazard reasons," Merrin says. "And it sounds like I'd better explain a lot more about my Exception Handling training and my capabilities, until our implicit-assumptions are in agreement."  

She's not sure exactly what Estha is worried she would be suspicious of - she's already modeling that he's from a lower-tech world that does not have, say, powered tungsten carbide saws as standard emergency gear?

Also, this totally is a digression from - what were they even talking about that ended up diverted to this topic - oh. Right. That.

"Um, before we dive into sorting out assumptions in our working relationship, we...were kind of in the middle of talking about our personal relationship?" she says. "Should we wrap that up first?" 

"Yes, good thought."

"It sounds like we're not on fucking terms.  Pain?  Oral?"

Time moves slowly, for them, one new spell per day.

He wants to try Death Ward on Mariona, to see if she gets her levels back.

He wants to try Break Enchantment on Mariona.

...He knows on some level that the G̶͕͝r̷̰̈ȩ̴͂a̸̳͑ṱ̸̚ ̷͓̀Ń̷͍ǒ̵͎o̷̝͝d̴̖͂l̵̠̆ý̶̺ ̴͔͆O̵̰͗n̸̻̂e̵̪͝ wouldn't let it work, if he tried it.  Esta still doesn't know what to do about that besides try things anyway.

Next up on the next 24h cycle following Esta's next prayer is Ride the Waves, by which means Esta can look through some deeper underwater caves with Locate Object, that Lay of the Land say to run deeper than the 840 feet he could probe from the surface; and then look through some simpler and shallower cave systems with Detect Magic, though that might be blocked by stone, and is not reliable.

Merrin questions him in detail on the spell and concludes that it’s…actually very close to the same feature set as her armor on full aquatic mode? 

She’d like to go with him. She can’t usefully help with the search spells, but she has the software version of the map and better radiation sensors than what she can give him to wear and she still suspects she has a more detailed predictive model of the various hazards this planet keeps throwing at them. And it's just in general often safer to do things in pairs – if something happens to her then that'll inconvenience him, but if she can point out a danger that would otherwise have forced him to Word of Recall back to the camp and heal himself, then that would mean more searching gets done. Merrin will hear out his arguments to the contrary, if he has them, but she thinks that on net she will not slow him down. 

(Also, cave-diving is epic and cool and - she's trying not to think of it as explicitly romantic, but it's certainly good for their working relationship to do more teamwork-searching.) 

(Click for 6-second movie)

Wind Walk.

If Merrin asks why they didn't do this earlier and instead of getting her injured trying to ride a tidal bore, it's because Esta has never cast this spell before, Esta didn't realize how much danger she was in, and Esta was leery of messing with his 6th-circle slots under poor prayer communication conditions.  And not at all because Iker Egobar had helpfully mentioned to Esta upon his attaining 6th-circle that everyone would be incredibly unimpressed with Esta if he found some flimsy excuse to cast Wind Walk, after which Esta had very nearly managed to forget the spell existed.

From Merrin’s point of view, ‘never cast the spell before’ is a full explanation and she has no further questions! 

(Merrin continues to have a much less detailed understanding of how exactly [clerics] of [gods] acquire their eroLARP superpowers [spells] than Estha now does of her Exception Handling specialist capabilities, and she would be pretty reluctant to try a piece of gear or an emergency maneuver she had literally never trained on before, in field conditions, on ANOTHER PLANET, with no backup, etc etc.)

If he thinks it’s safe, though, she would be delighted to accompany him and walk in the wind. It’s pretty epic! 

Yeah, okay, perhaps Kalorm is warming up to this Estha person, because Wind Walk is AWESOME!!!

As fun as it would be to swoosh around some slimecaves at low tide, that does not actually make sense as a strategy — they can swoosh around much faster above ground, without the risk of running into a pocket of radon accumulation, and any depth of cave that’s safely unflooded at low tide is within reach of Estha’s Locate Object spell. 

The interconnected tidal caves extend a pretty long way, though, and the Bag could conceivably have ended up tossed and wedged pretty far “upstream” in one of them. They’ll end up covering land areas that Merrin never got anywhere near in her own limited exploration.

(Click for movie.)

Merrin is in many ways so fond of her stupid horrible exoplanet with all its hazards and inhospitality to terrestrial life. 

And she's always been good at finding her moments of joy. It's kind of silly to be proud of how beautiful it is, and feel like she gets to show it off to Estha as though it's in any meaningful way hers, but who's going to stop her? 

They can't really justify taking any time away from the Bag search to do fun things for no reason, when that's still their highest-probability-of-success plan for getting off the planet even if the conditions under which it might or might not ever work are deeply metaphysically confusing. 

But Estha has a limited number of minutes per day of Locate Object, and if at some point he's out, with many hours to go until his next prayers, and it's a beautiful day outside and he's immune to UV and he has a Ride the Waves going spare...

...the continental shelf out to sea is really neat. That's where most of the life on this planet is. Would Esta like to come out and see it with her? 

(Merrin is trying not to frame it as a romantic date, but - it has to be good for him, too, to do fun things once in a while, when this has been going on for days and days?) 

He weighs the proposal for a time.  He could, in principle, spend more of that time looking through caves with Detect Magic that might have his Bag somewhere that Detect Magic could find it.

...but like, actually in real life, probably, they are not getting out of here until Ÿ̵͕̳o̴̢͖̍͆g̴͖̕-̷̪̩͛S̷̟͂̒o̶̩̩͋̽t̷͓͛̈́h̷͇̃ő̸̞̚͜t̸̛̩͠h̶̖͎̋ has accomplished whatever great and incomprehensible purpose It intends.  Probably a greater variety of interactions between himself and Merrin, without him yet doing anything that would collapse their relationship to straightforward dominance or hatred, gets them there faster.  Right?

Right!

Sure, Esta will go on a fun date.

...The incredibly lost squirrel has started to seem more distant over time.  Either that planet is drifting away, or the squirrel itself is; probably the latter, if it's chittering around with no entities to tyrannize and nobody to tyrannize it.

The squirrel is still using all the Locate Objects every day; and it has requested spells reminiscent of searching for something through land and air and water.  But Asmodeus has been down this road before; it's time to retrieve that pet squirrel.  If it's searching for something worth the time, Cheliax can Gate back to that planet afterwards.

The next time the squirrel prays, it gets a Sending, a Plane Shift, and a Homeward Bound.  Hopefully that message is clear enough.