But Asmodeus is nearly as much a god of civilizations as was Abadar or Aroden, because people can be so much more Lawful Evil when they gather into larger and wealthier (but not too wealthy) cities.

One might think that radios would enable larger and more tyrannical empires, if a greater weight of other gods could no longer oppose Asmodeus about that...

But that is not a reason for Asmodeus to want radios.

That is a reason for Asmodeus to want telegraphs.

The problem with telegraphs, in fact, is that the knowledge behind them leads to radios.

Radios lead to voice radio broadcasts.

And while radio broadcasting is only the very beginning of what another civilization might perhaps have called "social media", even that much sociality of media is more sociality than Asmodeus wants to see.

Voice radio broadcasts make politics much more national.  To a much greater degree in the presence of radios that can be attuned to voice broadcasts, ordinary people turn aside from the governance of their little towns, and become obsessed with the doings of famous national politicians; and not only caring, as they do at all times, about whether a draft or a tax might be about to strike their village.  Gossip about kings and queens displaces gossip about mayors.

In democracies, republics, and countries where a significant number and variety of factions have power, the presence of national radio broadcasts will polarize all politics behind a handful of flags.  The whole people of a radio-enabled country become like the residents of Oppara, Taldor's great central city, lining up behind one of four and then just two major chariot-racing teams.  Factions and journalists compete to capture the minds of villagers listening to the local broadcast radio, searching the space of possible arguments for memes that will appeal to and exploit average villagers; and those villagers in turn will be exposed to much more virulent memes, brewed in faster-bubbling cauldrons.

This makes people a little more Evil.

But it makes them a lot more Chaotic.

The net effect is not to Asmodeus's advantage.

And should that technology tree advance to the point of actual television, the collapse of all once-great countries into ruin cannot be more than a century or two delayed.

If the squirrel were still part of a functioning Church hierarchy, Asmodeus might have tried to extract utility from this situation by conveying orders to the squirrel's superiors.

As it is, though, the pet squirrel had been on thin ice already.  Asmodeus has by now gathered that the squirrel got itself incredibly lost by being flung around by an Outer God; and those are rarely working to the benefit of Lawful Evil.  Insofar as one can ever generalize about Outer Gods, at all, ever, most Outer Gods are more "get off my lawn, physics" Chaotic than "I hate coordination" Chaotic.  But that Their thralls do not detect as Lawful Evil is not just a quirk of Pharasma's classification system.

You have outlived your positive expected utility to Asmodeus, tiny pet squirrel.  Hopefully you and everyone you were working with die as soon as the Endure Elements and Planetary Adaptation run out.

Bye-bye.

He goes to Merrin, as soon as he trusts his voice to speak at all, and not break in a way that would convey vulnerability, because they may perhaps be on an important time limit if this leads Merrin to think of anything she did not think of earlier.

Esta does not know what his face might be showing.  Perhaps it is showing nothing at all.  It would be nice to think that about himself.

I have proven unworthy of Him -- the words come to mind, and then also in that same moment a thought surging up from somewhere that had been very deep and buried, why bother --

He sticks to the simple fact, put into words.  It requires the least thinking to decide how to phrase, if there are no other goals.

"Asmodeus dropped me as a cleric."

Oh that's hilarious. Great work, Merrin! 

Seriously, Kalorm?

Shut. Up. Not. Helping. 

(It seems unlikely that anything Merrin did or didn't do, in her handling of the conversation, was a deciding factor here? Especially when you narrow it down from the set of all sounds Merrin could have made with her mouth to, like, the subset of responses that would in any vaguely plausible world be things she might actually do or say. It was probably overdetermined by alternate-Estha finding the destroyed Bag, and by the Outer God's gameplan. She was in some sense trying to steer for this, not necessarily today but eventually, but it's probably not actually causally downstream of her own clever planning.) 

(...And she can keep telling herself that as many times as she wants, and it won't affect the ground truth one way or another, that apparently Merrin doesn't want to have been - meaningfully responsible - for Estha losing his god.) 

Merrin tries not to show too much of an emotional reaction, because it doesn’t seem like it will help the situation if she projects being upset or being happy about it.

“Did you hold onto the Create Water and Purify Food spells or no?” she says, because that’s quite immediately relevant to her planning. If Estha can no longer make water then she should go fill the reservoir on the new topside still now, while she’s still immune to temperatures.

He still feels like he has those spells, but as he tries to Create a small amount of water, it feels like he is blocked from casting it, missing some key element of himself that would let the spell unfold from inside him.  The part of himself that reached out and extended toward the divine, and with itself could stir some tiny piece of the divine or what relies upon the divine, is gone.

"I can no longer cast orisons."

It's interesting how much this doesn't, on an emotional level, actually feel like an enormous negative update about their situation. It's obviously correct for Merrin to be calm and matter-of-fact about it, but it's also not even hard. 

(It's probably relevant that one of the possibilities here - specifically, Aspexia Rugatonn showing up with a Gate - seemed vastly worse for Merrin's future prospects than just eventually dying of micronutrient deficiencies on a weird exoplanet, and that seems - well, she can't rule anything out, she does not understand the causes of any of the things happening enough to be confident, but it seems significantly less likely. ...It might also be relevant that being upset and stressed sounds unpleasant? And Merrin, as much as anyone, prefers to avoid unpleasant hurty thoughts, and so if her brain is going to helpfully do some dissociation for her, she's not going to argue with it on that matter, at least not until the straightforward urgent work is done.) 

There are...a lot of plan updates to be made, and some of them are going to take careful thought and a fully awake and reasoning Laeirthe, but Merrin's immediate thoughts are concrete and logistical. They're...actually fine on the scale of the next planetary month, she thinks? The shelter is good, summer won't kill them. She already knows what she can eat from local biomass and where and how to find it. Water is the only survival constraint requiring any really time-sensitive actions.

It's still daytime, and it's still going to be daytime for a while longer - 53 days after Merrin's arrival on-planet, the days are now almost 40 hours long, and the outside temperature was irrelevant until just now but it's going to be heatstroke-risk temperatures from now until well after dark. On future days they can simply wait to do still-refill trips until the cool part of the night, but the problem with that right now is that then they wouldn't get still-produced water until the next day is heating up, which, because this planet is awful, would mean waiting like 48 hours. 

(Also, if Merrin were in Estha's position right now, she would probably kind of want some space? So perhaps it's convenient that Merrin needs to do an urgent water-carrying mission, not that she's going to argue if he offers to accompany her but she's the one with the power armor.) 

"Okay," she says. "I can make enough freshwater with my still, but I need to actually fill it with seawater and I should do that really soon, before my Endure Elements wears off and while it's still hot enough to make some freshwater before sunset. How long ago did you last top up the water tank, it'll disappear after 24 hours, right? ...I should eat as much of the Created food as we can while it's good, since I don't think we can actually preserve it with magic, though I already have ice from last night in the icebox so we could try that. I still have the Share Language for a while, so I should memorize and I can write down as much vocabulary as I have time for, though I think I'm going to want to mainly speak the one you were Sharing before, I had time to actually learn the grammar structures for it. I'll need to plan a harvest mission on my own, but I have some preserved stores and some live snails to process, that's not urgent." 

Pause. 

"...Your magic items still work, right, and you don't actually need to eat? Do you need to drink water?" It feels pretty silly, now, that apparently she never registered the answer to that question, but it was just not at all relevant before, when they had Unlimited Magic Water, and now they don't. 

Some part of himself, Esta realizes, had thought that his magic items would stop working too, had been trying to prepare for that.  But of course there's no logical reason for that.

"There is no reason that would change."

His belt and headband continue to function in ways he can immediately feel.  But Esta is suddenly afraid to point that out to Merrin, now that she knows him to be unable to defend what was his.

"-- and I put only water from Create Food and Water into the water-tank, no water from Create Water.  So none of that should disappear."

How strange, to look back and realize how much he had been expecting to be abandoned, before he was abandoned; how little he had meant it, all the times he had told himself it was only just to prepare against the remote case that the planar distances grew wider.

(Esta does not think this because there are no remaining approved thoughts besides "Hold still and wait for your execution", and so all that he does now is being done mostly without thinking.)