…Merrin thought she might have found a pulse just then, for a couple of seconds before the water jostled her fingers out of position and she lost it. 

She's not drawing any confident conclusions, let alone making any emotional updates, until she's on some kind of solidish ground - her focus now is on where to find that around here - 

A rock! A flattish rock! Not yet submerged! But close to the waterline, such that she can clamber up onto it dragging an unconscious person without too much difficulty!

Merrin has been isolated and lonely and trying not to go completely insane from all of that, and one of her strategies has been letting the silly anthropomorphizing parts of her savannah-hominid brain go do their thing a bit. Not too much, she's not confused about physical reality or whether rocks have experiences or intentions, but...a little bit. 

Thank you, rock, she thinks, and then - ugh, she can't grab it, she's using both hands right now - she'll turn herself around and deliberately crash herself into it, taking the impact across the back of her suit (ow) (she'll need to do a careful maintenance survey for damage but she hasn't broken anything in her body, she'll just have some impressive bruises) but mostly cushioning her patient from it. 

It's a really stupid place to stay for longer than five or ten minutes, because the tide is still rising and the high-water line is probably ten meters above her current position and her estimate is that the rock will be completely underwater in less than twenty minutes. 

Well. She'll just have to try to not be here in twenty minutes. But right now the rock is exactly where Merrin needs it to be, and she takes half a second to pat it in gratitude for existing in the perfect place at exactly the time she needed it. 

- check for a pulse properly? 

The burst of relief and joy that Merrin feels, in that moment, is possibly the single strongest positive emotion that Merrin has experienced in the last six planetary months. 

(She's also a little surprised, but not really confused per se. It doesn't violate her model of physical reality that someone could still have a faint-but-palpable pulse after like three and a half minutes of submersion.) 

...Okay but he's still not breathing, which means that Merrin now has to solve the STUPIDEST PROBLEM. She's been aware of it since before she caught up to him, because in a rescue scenario she's always thinking multiple steps ahead for multiple contingencies. 

The problem is that Merrin did not pack with the assumption that she would be rescuing anyone but herself.

And so she has oxygen, but only in her suit tanks. She even has some improvised adaptors and tubing that would let her hook up an oxygen cannula to inside her suit, if for some reason she had to take it off to repair it and also at the same time she was having a respiratory problem (since under remotely normal circumstances she would simply not need extra oxygen, she's fully acclimatized to the atmosphere now.) 

She does not have a setup to provide artificial ventilation from her suit reservoir, because why in the world would she have that, if Merrin were at any point not breathing on her own then she would definitely not be in any shape to do anything about it to rescue herself, right. 

She can unseal her helmet and do mouth-to-mouth ventilation - if she tanks the risk that he might have radon gas in his lungs, but since she grabbed him her suit sensors have not actually detected any radioactivity, so probably he didn't go very far into the cave or didn't stay for very long and only took a small dose to his lungs, one she can't actually detect from outside his chest cavity - but the stupid problem. Is that normally this works because, when one is breathing 21%-oxygen air, the exhaled air still has about 16% oxygen, which is far from ideal but is, like, at all workable. But right now Merrin is breathing 13.5% oxygen air, and her exhaled air will have, like, 8% oxygen probably, and that's well into the Death Zone-equivalent-altitude when converted to a partial pressure and is simply not workable at all. 

Merrin's solution is also stupid but it's not complicated. 

She dials the oxygen concentration of the air her suit is giving her to 100%. (She overrides two alarms asking her if she's really, really sure she wants to do that - from the suit's perspective, for literally no reason, her own vitals are fine.) 

She takes the biggest breath she can manage. 

She unseals the helmet, still holding her breath - and inevitably wastes multiple liters of O2 in the process, but her tank is starting out full - and she can get, like, three rescue breaths, enough to see his chest rise, and then hold her breath and wait for five seconds and do it again - before she has to put the helmet back on again to get more air (which is a fifteen-second interruption but that's not unworkably long...) 

She's really hoping she won't have to do this for too long, because she's driving her own PaO2 insanely high in the process and it's making her feel Weird, but it works. 

He's got a +4 Constitution belt, though not one that began from a very lofty beginning, and started out with 87 HP -- in Merrin's terms, a frankly inhuman ability to resist damage that isn't suffocation -- and also there's a Ring of Sustenance firmly on one finger, and an Amulet of Natural Armor that's firmly beneath his regular armor.  He has been tossed around some, indeed, but he's not dead, or close to dead, from that.  It is impossible that there would be any non-drowning sources of ongoing HP loss inside him, since the non-drowning damage didn't take him below 0 HP.  Merrin will find Esta's lips shockingly warm to the touch -- on account of his lasting Endure Elements -- though this isn't actually helpful from the standpoint of oxygen deprivation.  And finally, he's had one more minute of breathing than she thinks he's had.

However her Breath of Life-like supernatural ability works -- though she is taking the name weirdly literally -- she's going to be rolling against an unexpectedly low DC.

Merrin is noticing significantly more confusion about the fact that he feels warm than she was about finding a pulse! 

...Her conclusion, however, is remembering that it’s over 40° C out here and 100% humidity, and maybe the thing where he inexplicably wouldn’t answer her in Baseline can be attributed to his being thoroughly delirious from heatstroke.

Several minutes of abrupt immersion in 6° C water is not, like, the recommended treatment for heatstroke per se, but it’s hopefully made the situation better rather than worse? 

She can get him to the point of coughing up some water, and then taking a breath on his own, within a couple of minutes. 

The rock they’re on still has some clearance above the water. She doesn’t immediately have to relocate.

...She'll get out the portable pulse ox from her front pouch and put it on his finger. She's pretty dubious that he's going to oxygenate well enough on 13.5% oxygen to keep breathing on his own for the length of time it'll take her to get back to camp - she's not even sure how to get him back, that's another very stupid problem - but she should check where they're at now. And then she'll check his pupils and (sorry!) see if she can get any response to a painful stimulus.

Is she... trying to measure a property of internal bodily gloop... that has... something to do with hitpoints?

Creation will attest to the part where, at this point, Esta has taken enough damage plus nonlethal damage that he is not gonna just wake up, here.  Inflicting an additional HP of nonlethal damage, or whatever it is the entity is trying to do to Esta, is hardly going to help.

His eyes... probably go on functioning... as eyes?  Given that he's now apparently almost entirely alive?

If the entity starts wanting to measure eldritch percentages having to do with Esta's internal body gloop, that is between her and whatever alternative concept of reality this Far Tapestry creature is imposing upon her surroundings.

She's getting an O2 saturation reading of 92%???? ....Which, fine, starts dropping almost immediately now that she's not giving him a bunch of extra oxygen, but it looks like it's going to steady out at, like, 86%, which isn't ideal but is around what she would expect from "not particularly acclimatized to this planet's atmosphere" and "some minor lung fuckery from aspirating seawater".

She doesn't love it but it doesn't seem like he's going to stop breathing in the next ten minutes. She has a stupid plan to get him more oxygen for the next multiple hours that it'll take her to somehow get both of them back to her campsite, but it involves taking off her suit, so she would really rather not have to do it until she's at the top of the bank rather than perched on a rock that's going to be submerged any minute now. 

(She turns her suit oxygen down to atmospheric levels, to save the tank for later.) 

Ughhhh now she has to figure out how to carry him up a steep, and slippery, limestone bank covered in just-rehydrated mucilaginous biofilm - it's below the high tide line, and was just soaked with spray from the earlier tidal bore - and she has to do it without risking making his injuries much worse. 

Merrin does have a cervical collar in her front pouch, since "giving herself a neck injury" seemed like a pretty plausible outcome of a Stupid Accident. (The design is unfold-and-inflate-with-air-to-use, it packs small.) 

She'll use that to immobilize his neck, and then she'll - ugh! - get back into the water with him, being really very careful to keep his head above the surface, and swim upstream with the tidal current until she finds a slightly less steep area, and then she will, again, crash herself into the bank on purpose to shed her momentum, and then she'll sort of crab-scoot backward out of the water, mostly using her legs, holding her unconscious boyfriend with her hands under his armpits.

She's scratching the heck out of her suit, and it's going to take her like half an hour, but she can get up the bank, faster than the rising water does, without slipping and tumbling both of them back into the tidal current and without banging him around too much. 

Any change in his condition over that time period? Either breathing-related or consciousness-related? 

Why... would somebody's hitpoints change... if nobody was using a Heal skill on them???  These events are not a full day of rest.

One supposes that any areas of exposed skin would be getting sunburned but that ain't exactly lethal damage either.  Plus he's a Chelish, they get restless if you don't ever set them on fire a little.

Merrin is resigned to him getting pretty sunburned and having to deal with that later, but she has carefully checked this - by deliberately exposing a tiny strip of skin on her wrist - and half an hour of exposure, eight hours past noon, in this season, shouldn't be enough for third-degree burns. ...And in fact he's getting burned more slowly than she expects. Maybe the UV is unusually low today, or maybe her skin is just more sensitive somehow. 

It's 40:53, local time, when she reaches the top of the bank. In her exact location, the temperature is actually down to just 38° C, thanks to the mass of cold ocean water right there doing more than literally nothing to cool the air faster. Further inland it's still going to be hanging out around 42° C. 

...Okay. 

Temporary shelter, here, now, because Merrin needs time to make sure he's stable and to think and plan, and "temporary emergency shelter" is actually something she prepped for.

She has a subset of the tent poles with her, no longer necessary for her cave shelter now that she's rebuilt it out of local materials, and she has an emergency blanket folded up tightly. She'll make a lean-to, that's the fastest configuration to shade them from the sun. 

(The temperature in the shade will manage to be a couple of degrees cooler, but not more, the rocks are still radiating heat under them. Merrin's suit is not quite keeping up and she's not very comfortable.)

She lays him down in recovery position and then removes her armor, as quickly as she reasonably can, and does the whole plug-her-adaptor-into-the-oxygen-outlet routine, and then - this was not really part of her plan - tests whether she can put the suit back on and run the tube out through the open helmet. (She can seal the suit at the neck and it'll still climate-control the rest of her body.) 

It works! It's kind of uncomfortable but she can cope with it for however long it takes to get back to camp. 

Now she's stuck staying within like two meters of him, but she can put oxygen cannula on him and get his O2 saturation reading up to a happy number instead of an ehhhh-kinda-tolerable number, which to her surprise only takes like 2L/min.

That's better. It does a lot to improve her mood. 

And then she can finally properly check his other vital signs - surprisingly fine??? in particular his core temperature is just normal????? - and then check him over for obvious injuries such as broken bones, which she's pretty sure he definitely has but she had not previously had a chance to pay attention to it. 

(Merrin is, in fact, confused about as many as several of her recent medical observations! She is mentally registering that she did not think the tidal bore impact would be survivable at all, and even if it was she would really have expected more obvious head trauma if he was unconscious and unable to even try to shield his head for as long as she's been assuming he was, and it's actually kind of surprising that his skin would feel warm seconds after pulling him out of cold water, even if his core temperature hadn't had time to start dropping much, and actually it's pretty weird that his core temp is normal, and also it's honestly bizarre that he was oxygenating as well as he managed to on 13.5% atmospheric O2 immediately after a near-drowning incident, and in short there are like a dozen separate observations that she cannot make sense of yet. But she's also very busy and very stressed and apparently really, really out of practice at handling the kind of stressed-out she can get in a situation where if she fucks something up then someone else who isn't her will die - and also, not to mention, that person is Estha even though it makes no sense that he's on her exoplanet - and it's actually taking pretty much all the attention she can spare from the medical emergency, which isn't much, to manage her emotional state and stay focused. She can worry about coming up with hypotheses that would fit with the disparate confusing observations later.) 

He hasn't literally broken all the bones, he is wearing a bunch of torso armor for example, but any long straight appendages sticking out of him have been bludgeoned into other things and had a poor time of that.  Only not, you know, in a way that would correspond to his HP going below 0, because he didn't take that much damage quantitatively speaking before he drowned; so his spine and his neck and so on are going to be fine, because that would correspond to losing more HP than he'd lost.  Probably his HP protects those bits specifically.

Creation is not sure it understands everything she's been doing to Esta.  Does it make any sense if Creation asks whether this counted as her rolling against her Heal skill to Treat Deadly Wounds?  (And if so, Creation has a bunch of further questions, like whether she exceeded the DC on the roll by at least 5, and if so what her Wisdom bonus is.)

(Probably nothing that Merrin has actually done yet would count as Treating Deadly Wounds for the purposes of putting any hit points back! The oxygen is mostly just giving him Golarion-at-sea-level-equivalent air rather than Golarion-at-quite-high-altitude equivalent air, and other than that she's basically just done an assessment to gather information on his condition, rather than treating anything yet!) 

...Merrin has a splint in her emergency safety-checklist pouch. In case she managed to break a bone in a Stupid Accident.

She does not have four splints. So, uh, she is kind of going to have to drag him back to her camp with a lot of smashed bone shards in his arms and legs being jostled. She doesn't even have any IV painkillers, because it would have been a bad idea to give those to herself when she needed to be alert and focused and getting herself back to safety. She has oral painkillers but he's too unconscious to swallow them. 

Ugh. At least he doesn't obviously have broken ribs. Though after checking his pupils again and removing his glowy costume hat for a closer look at his head (she left whatever's on the back of his head in place, it was really attached), she's pretty suspicious that he has at least a concussion and probably a skull fracture and she is PRETTY UNHAPPY about this, because her medical facilities SUCK, but given her lack of any proper diagnostic equipment, really all she can do is monitor his breathing and vital signs closely until she's back where she has a portable ultrasound to check for intracranial bleeding. 

It's still a less severe head injury than she would expect given the forces involved and Merrin is DEEPLY SUSPICIOUS that she's missing something here, but she doesn't have anything to do with that confusion just yet. 

...She'll give him the exactly one liter of IV fluids she keeps in her safety pouch (in case of Stupid Accidents involving either losing a lot of blood or, like, somehow accidentally eating something that gives her horrible food poisoning). Mostly because she doesn't want him to get fucking heatstroke on the trek back, it's going to take like ten hours before the temperature is reasonable out here. She also has epinephrine, in case of Unexpected Hazards involving something on this planet that gives her an anaphylactic reaction, and she's holding that in reserve in case his vital signs get scary before she's back, but his blood pressure is actually fine right now even though that continues to be VERY SURPRISING to her. 

(This miiiight count to Creation as attempting a Heal check? Unclear?) 

Merrin obviously has ranks in Heal.  She is obviously using that knowledge.  The only question remains whether she has spent one (1) hour on doing Healy things and expended two (2) uses of a healer's kit.

That seems like kind of an absurd standard given how many critical lifesaving tasks Merrin can accomplish in like ten minutes if she has to, but no, she has neither spent an hour on this yet nor expended two uses of a healer's kit. 

Creation is getting the feeling that this Entity of the Far Tapestry has definite opinions about how reality should work around her, and they Do Not involve Esta recovering HP corresponding to his character level (12), plus Merrin's Wisdom bonus (+5) if she exceeds the DC by 5, exactly at the end of her first hour of work.  Plus a corresponding 17 points of nonlethal damage.

...it wouldn't make much of a difference, after Esta drowned and his HP dropped to -1 about that, he's got more than 34 points of nonlethal keeping him unconscious.  Esta is probably going to stay out until he's done a day of natural healing, or Long-Term Care if Merrin cares to roll her Heal about that too.

But Esta's, uh, 'vital signs', can improve on a continuous basis as the Far Tapestry Entity applies more healing.  If that.  Works better for It.

(Oh, yeah, to be clear Merrin is absolutely not expecting to sleep tonight, she's planning to take a mildly stupid amount of stimulants and be up all night probably, because it's not like she can trade off with anyone for a break. Buuuuuuuut this is going to have to wait a while, because her equivalent of a ""healer's kit"" is almost entirely in a different location.) 

...How exactly is she going to get him back without risking exacerbating the skull fracture. That's...a puzzle. She can try just carrying him in her arms, with the power armor she's strong enough, but the terrain is very challenging and Merrin is familiar with her base rate per hour of misjudging her footing and tripping or stumbling even when she's not having her center of gravity all thrown off by an entire deadweight unconscious person in her arms, and of course if she does have a deadweight unconscious person in her arms then she's substantially impaired at recovering from a stumble without falling on her face. And if she falls on top of him she will make his head injury worse. Which would be really bad!

She has two tent poles. (Or, well, up to six tent poles in the shortest configuration, but one configuration gives her two tent poles a bit over 2m long each.) 

...She does not actually have enough paracord to make a stretcher out of the tent poles – since she's alone, she's thinking a travois form factor, lay the poles parallel and keep one end of each in her hands with the other ends dragging on the ground behind her – but what she does have is a river right there. With a current that's not even unreasonable at this point. And there's probably strapwrack at the bottom of the permanent channel.  

After another five minutes of watching him, her subconscious intuition is actually feeling remarkably positive on the prospect of leaving him unattended - and without extra oxygen, since she has to take the power armor with its oxygen tanks with her - for the ten minutes or so it'll take her to swim down, harvest some fronds, and swim back up, and then run back from however far she got swept along by the current.