Even with all the highly optimized insulation and ventilation that Merrin has managed so far, and the afternoon high juuust starting to drop, and the fact that she's started stripping the tarp off in the middle of the night and leaving the shelter door cracked open and actively trying to get the temperature inside to below freezing by dawn, it's still gotten up to 31° C in her shelter. 

And the noon sun coincided with low tide and an enormous nearby evaporation surface, so the relative humidity outside is nearly 100%. Even with her poor abused repurposed-portable-ventilator unit blasting its maximum air pressure of colder-and-thus-lower-water-content cave air from deeper under the earth, it's still 82% humidity inside. 

28.8° C wet-bulb temperature. Survivable, for now. Pretty good, really, when the outside wet-bulb temperature is still at 47° C and would give an unprotected human heatstroke within minutes, but that does not mean that Merrin is comfortable or in a good mood.

She's overheated. She's down to exactly four meal bars held in reserve in case she gets sick or something and has been supplementing with low-calorie pouches instead. She's hungry and thirsty and incredibly tired of every single possible variation on cooked snail meat and bulbwrack "baked goods". 

She's finishing her routine suit maintenance, and mulling on a plan for her afternoon.

It's kind of a stupid plan, but Kalorm is all for it, even Laeirthe acknowledges the pragmatic expected-value benefit to her future survival prospects, and it would give her an excuse to put on her power armor and leave her stupid hot humid cave for a few hours - while the sun is still up, even - and DO SOMETHING. She's booooooooored. This is by no means the worst threat to her survival but she's sooooooo booooooooored. 

She checks the time. 37:55, which no longer even qualifies as late afternoon these days. Sunset won't be for another thirteen hours. But the tidal bore is due in just a couple more hours, and should bring in some cooler more refreshing air, and then she would have her window for her stupid-but-maybe-worth-it plan... 

Vicar Esta will after recent events be Stunned for several rounds and Discombobulated for some time after that.

...but will eventually recover to the point of trying, more or less on total reflex, to lay a Lesser Restoration on himself.

He can't cast it, and it's not immediately obvious why.

So, uh.  Where is Vicar Esta and what sort of sensory impressions is he getting right now?  If it's relevant, he had an Endure Elements up and a couple of combat-related buffs.

He seems to be at the bottom of a river valley with limestone walls of varying steepness, with a step-like erosion pattern. 

There's still a river in the valley, but it's a small one, with a sluggish current. Certainly the ground under his feet is thoroughly dry, baked and cracked, though the air is too humid to be a desert. 

The river is a very odd shade of deep maroon.  

The sun looks...wrong. The light is a shade too harsh, a little too on the bluish side of white. 

Going by the heat-shimmer, it's very hot, though if he has Endure Elements up then he will not yet be inconvenienced by the temperature of 47.8° C and nearly 100% humidity. The blueish sun, however, despite being very far away and not actually setting the landscape on fire, is also going to be steadily dealing some sort of Fire damage, noticeable within minutes of exposure. 

There's also an entrance to a cave, thataways. 

(Oh, incidentally, despite being at a sea-level pressure this air only has two-thirds as much oxygen as it should. For someone who does not have dath ilani metacognition training, and the easily available hypothesis that atmospheres will vary, this will probably not be directly noticeable until he's attempting some kind of physical exertion.) 

Due to his current state of Discombobulation, Esta is not thinking overwhelmingly clearly.  His current Wisdom, even with the augmentation of his headband, is below the WIS 12 required for him to successfully cast Lesser Restoration on himself.

If Esta had better introspection running, he'd notice that his cognition is generally impaired; but the thing is, it is exactly Wisdom that one would use to introspect on that sort of thing.

Esta feels exposed in these surroundings!  The CAVE looks less exposed.  What happens to him if he tries to stagger in the general direction of the cave?  In particular, what happens when he gets to the river?

The river looks significantly deeper than its width, and is not quiiiite narrow enough at any point to easily jump across. The current is steady and smooth but only medium speed. If he wants to jump and land half-in the water but able to grab the opposite bank - or just to try swimming it - he could probably manage that.

(It's also quite shockingly cold, compared to the ambient air temperature, but with an Endure Elements up, neither temperature extreme is going to stand out as much.)

Even in his current mentally damaged state, Esta does not feel like he wants to just jump in the water like that!

What happens if he looks around for a place where the river widens enough to be shallow or narrows enough to be jumpable?  For a couple of minutes, say.

He can eventually find a spot further up, a bit past the cave, where an enormous boulder wedged deep in the sediment sticks out into the river, forming an overhang that the water mostly flows under. It's stable under his weight, though, and from there it would only be a three-meter jump at a slightly downward angle. 

The sun sure is dealing more Fire damage than a sun has any right to. 

Back at her camp, Merrin checks the time, confirms that the tidal bore is due in the next 30 to 45 minutes, and starts donning her power armor and running through her safety checklists. 

She's still considering that she might bail out on her stupid plan, but she likes watching the wave crash in. 

Hmm.  Fire damage.  From the perspective of anyone not from Cheliax, Esta has spent a surprising amount of time being on fire.  Esta lacks a proper startle reaction to this state of being.  Especially since it's the sort of fire damage you get from being slowly tortured by someone authorized to do that, rather than the sort of fire damage you get in combat as might provoke a more appropriate reaction.

It is weird that nobody is telling him to hold still and accept his punishment.

He'll try to jump the river at the boulder-point.  That seems very wise, really, given his current state of mind.  He definitely wanted to be on the other side of this river at some past point, and if you can't coordinate with your past self then who can you even coordinate with?

How does this wise life-choice work out for him?

He gets a bit wet but this does not cause any unexpected additional damage. 

The cave is no longer actually in sight, but if he remembers which way to turn and keep walking, it'll only take him five minutes or so to backtrack along the side of the river and find the cave again. 

The cave would be good.  Wait, but then he's trying to not be on fire.  Is that bad?

Nobody has told him he's supposed to be on fire.

Well, but usually when somebody sets you on fire, it's sort of implied...

Actually.

What if an unauthorized person has set him on fire?

That would be outrageous.

Esta will stride more quickly for the cave.  He's not really outraged, not in the core of his soul, but the thought has occurred to him that possibly he ought to be outraged as a good Asmodean and that is almost the same thing as having an emotion.

The cave is out of the sun!

It’s pretty slimy. Moving through it without slipping is difficult, especially in the much dimmer lighting before his eyes adjust: A few meters in, there are puddles. It smells of brine and decay.

(The radon gas pooling in the cave today is colorless and odorless and will have no immediately obvious negative effects. The fact that it’s also displacing some of the already-lower oxygen might have noticeable effects for someone with more functional metacognition.)

Hmmm.  Yes.

This looks like an Adventure Cave.

Esta will wait a bit just inside the entrance of this cave to see if anyone brings backup for him, or if... something wears off...

Oh hey he's under some kind of status effect, isn't he.  One with minutes duration, at least.

Esta, using more careful deliberate focus this time, is going to cast Detect Magic to see if he can see what sort of magical effect is affecting him.

He doesn't see any magic on himself that's not supposed to be there.

He does successfully cast the Detect Magic.

Esta tries again with Lesser Restoration.  If there's anything impeding his Wisdom, he'd like it gone or reduced, please.

...WHAT THE ABYSS JUST HAPPENED TO HIM (and to Worldwound Fortress #14) and WHERE THE ABYSS IS HE?

Merrin, at this point, is departing her shelter and heading for the riverbank, equipped with her safety-checklist pouch of emergency supplies in case she manages to injure herself or her armor has a problem and she gets stranded.

Vicar Esta has now pulled from his Bag a Continual Flame skullcap -- not the sort of magical skullcap that might interfere with his headband, just some minor jewelry to light his way -- and is now looking at least the next layer deeper into this pleasant, out-of-the-burning-sun cave.  He does not have a huge number of skill ranks in Survival (Exoplanets) but he knows that pleasant little caves are often inhabited by things powerful enough to take and hold them -- though the victors of caves are not usually 6th-circle Asmodean cleric amounts of scary.

Esta is proceeding carefully nonetheless, but in the sense of looking around for dangerous predators as he goes, not so much in the sense of carrying a radiation detector with him.

Actually, this cave is remarkably clear of anything mobile and larger than a worm!

Some of the tidepools have shelled mollusks very firmly adhered to the bottom. There are tiny creepy-crawlies in the damp rotting piles of debris. One tidepool has segmented armored centipede-worm-fish creatures with very faint blue-green bioluminescence.

Other than that, it's really pretty much limited to slime. 

(And a tidepool holding a woven cage full of giant snails, but that's further in and around two corners.) 

Merrin reaches the top of the riverbank and perches on a pile of rocks. (She only brings her wicker chair and sun-slash-rain-shade out when she's using them, to minimize rate of UV degradation.) 

There's a line of white breaking at the edge of the line of purple, in the distance. Ten minutes, she thinks. She'll know it's due in four to five minutes when she starts hearing the roar and feeling the vibration through her boots. 

(Imaginary Kalorm thinks it's majestic and delightful.) 

Esta has nowhere near the ranks in Survival (Weird Fucking Caves) to deduce where on Golarion he got Teleported to, he isn't a Cave Druid.  He is not going to get remotely far enough from his starting point that he would run the tiniest chance of getting lost while mentally impaired.  He is just checking to make sure that he is not immediately next to a vampire apartment complex or an alghollthu student enrichment center.

Having done that part, he's going to move closer to the cave entrance; and then, on his current plan, he is going to pull a Sending scroll, and start the 10-minute process of calling for help.

He will get about six of those minutes with nothing in particular happening, and then there is going to be a Very Ominous Roar in the distance - the downstream distance - accompanied by a vibration he can feel in his bones through the stone. 

Oh, NOW what.  Really, Esta has been having enough of a bad day already.

Esta carefully disentangles his fingers from the Sending scroll's spell structure, letting the stored magic be pulled back into the page's expensive inks; and then strides quickly outside the cave to look.

Nothing is visibly happening, yet, at least not from where he’s standing!

(The tidal bore, today when it’s approaching the monthly spring tide, moves at well over 60 kilometers per hour. At the point when he can see the wave from his current location, he’ll only have seconds left to get out of the way.)

Merrin is maybe 200 meters further downstream, on the opposite bank, and sitting down. He might notice an armored figure, if he looks in the right direction, but it wouldn’t be trivial.

Merrin, unfortunately, is herself looking out to sea, and not back upstream.

Well, he is going to look all around for any visible sources of current problems, and he is going to do this while standing in the shade with a Continual Flame lamp on his head.  Probably also Detect Magic while he's at it, if Merrin would stand out on account of being such a magical person (and gets inside the 60ft detection radius).

Neither Merrin nor her power armor nor her other gear would show up to Detect Magic, even if the latter from a Golarion perspective really look like they should, and also she's out of range.

There is a distant humanoid figure there, though, silhouetted against the horizon - 

- and Merrin is intimately familiar with her little river valley, and she does habitually scan her surroundings a bit even when she has literally no reason to expect anything interesting to happen over there because this planet has no terrestrial life larger than worms. 

At some point her peripheral vision catches a flash of...something...and she instinctively twists her head to look - 

That doesn't - what - 

Even as an unusually strong face-recognizer, Merrin is too far away to be sure she can recognize a face from here, when the person in question is standing in the shadow of the danger cave (were they in the danger cave?? why would they do that??), but there's a flash of familiarity, it's just that it's taking her kind of a long time to place because it is COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTEXT and WHAT and HOW and WHY– 

Not that it actually matters exactly who just appeared on her horrible exoplanet in EXACTLY THE WRONG PLACE at the WORST POSSIBLE TIME. 

(Superheated toilet paper were they in the cave this whole time, last time Merrin checked the radon levels were really high for some reason and her sensors were already picking up on it within five meters of the entrance...) 

She's on her feet and running. 

- and toggling the mode on the power armor where it will project her voice from a speaker, since otherwise she's basically inaudible from inside it. 

"GET OUT OF THE RIVER CHANNEL!" she shouts. In Baseline. "TIDE INCOMING! THIRTY METER WAVE!" 

She's pretty sure she's not going to cover two hundred meters of uneven treacherous limestone ground and then get herself all the way down the bank before the wave arrives, no matter how reckless she is about falling. Let alone drag someone back up it. 

She's also not at all sure it's possible for a person hearing her warning now to make it all the way up the bank in time, at this point. It still takes her half an hour and they've got less than four minutes. But she's still going to try to warn him. 

Well, that sure is an armored foreign adventurer yelling something that she thinks is very alarming, in a magically amplified voice; and that in turn is broadly the act of someone trying to be helpful, or pretending to helpfulness.  If genuinely helpful, either they recognize the Worldwound armor or they don't recognize the Asmodeanism.

"SPEAK TALDANE!" he'll yell as loud as he can.

He will already be pulling a Comprehend Languages scroll from his Holding Bag in case that doesn't work.

(Merrin is also spectacularly confused and upset and mad at Reality right now, but none of those are productive emotions to dwell on and they can go somewhere else out of her way. She's good at that. It turns out she hasn't lost the knack even after months of solitude.) 

...His voice is lost under the roar more than hers, but she can make it out enough to tell that he sounds familiar too. 

She's abruptly more sure of her face-recognizer flash of identification. And more confused and upset and she STILL DOESN'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT focus focus focus - 

Except she...can't understand any of what he just shouted back to her...? Even though it feels like she should have heard enough to catch it? 

"ESTHA! NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR CONLANGS!* GET OUT OF THE CHANNEL!" she screams. 

(Her voice is...also going to sound kind of familiar, to Esta, even with the slightly distortion from the amplication. And the name she shouted wasn't quite the same pronunciation as his, but could be mistaken for it.) 


*This is a shorter phrase in Baseline because "now is not the time (for ____)" is a two-syllable word. 

...okay Esta is suddenly much MORE worried about what all got damaged BESIDES his Wisdom, because his brain thinks that is Mariona in unfamiliar armor and speaking in an unfamiliar language and accent.  And he doesn't know if that's because his befuddled mind is incorrectly identifying all other humanoids as Mariona, or if seeing something out of the Dark Tapestry rewrote his brain's native language into something that is not Taldane.

He will, nonetheless, cast Comprehend Languages from scroll, which takes him about six seconds, and then yell back still in Taldane, "SAY THAT AGAIN?"

Well, Merrin still didn't understand that, and she's now assigning higher likelihood that he was in fact inexplicably yelling in a conlang she's never heard before and it's not just her auditory processing failing.

(And her brain is still forming increasing certainty that he looks and sounds like her boyfriend Estha even though she does not even slightly have a theory for how or why he could possibly be on her exoplanet. Whatever he's wearing isn't even something her brain considers counterevidence, it's super doompunk but, like, it's Estha, he would.) 

She doesn't need a specific prompt to keep repeating the obvious warning in slightly different words, though. 

(She's not going to bother trying to warn him about the radioactive cave that he just left, or the UV, or the oxygen, those are not the priority right now - is he just confused and hypoxic because he was in the cave and it's having a bad enough radon-accumulation day to actually displace oxygen, it wouldn't be direct radiation sickness symptoms yet unless he was in there for multiple hours -)

"CLIMB TO HIGHER GROUND!" she shouts. "TIDAL BORE INCOMING! LESS THAN TWO MINUTES!" Maybe he can still make it, she's telling herself, though he's really in the wrong place for it, if he were on the opposite side of the tidal flats the stepped limestone bank would be pretty climbable, but near the cave it's really not...

Baseline is in many ways an incredibly weird language by Golarion standards, but the content of Merrin's warning is pretty straightforward. The only immediately-obvious linguistic differences that come across are that 'tidal bore' would be a much longer phrase in Taldane, something like "rising-ocean-tide-compressed-to-increase-speed-and-amplitude", and the time warning has some uncertainty quantifiers covered in the grammar, something like - it could be longer than two minutes, it's not her 99% confidence interval, but her 50% confidence interval is around or under two minutes, such that in a situation where it would be very costly to be wrong he should be rounding it to a hard deadline.

(Also the strongly imperative tense linguistically encodes something like a claim-to-authority, the sense that this is a phrasing where the speaker is speaking as some kind of expert who is taking charge of a situation due to having the relevant expertise - who in fact is specifically qualified to take the lead when an emergency is in progress - and who now expects and intends the listener to immediately follow her short clear instructions without asking clarifying questions until afterward, but it's sort of hard to unpack complicated linguistic implications in seconds under the circumstances.) 

All the complicated nuances of 'tidal bore' are not, actually, going to be conveyed into Esta's brain by a cute little 1st-circle spell.  Maybe you get that off 4th-circle Tongues but you do not get it off Comprehend Languages.

Esta has grasped that the canyon is about to flood.  He has not grasped the part of the compound Baseline word that invokes a mathematical concept about how compressing a passage increases the speed and amplitude of fluids traversing it according to a particular quantitative rule.

Spells which are unfortunately not part of the standard Worldwound loadout:  Water Breathing (3rd-circle for both clerics and wizards, 2 hours / caster level).

Items which are unfortunately not part of the standard Worldwound loadout:  Necklace of Adaptation (list price 9000gp, albeit in a price catalogue that is less than totally 100% trustworthy about what things would cost if you were not buying them from that particular merchant network).

Esta's Bag does have an emergency Air Bubble scroll, but it'll last, like, literally 1 minute.  It is a cheap-ass 1st-circle scroll that you carry because "it costs only 25gp", not because it is part of a clever advance strategy that requires you have an Air Bubble lasting 3 minutes instead.

Still, that ought to be enough to swim to the surface if this canyon floods...?  Timing the cast might be hard, though.  He thinks those time units sounded like "less than (somewhere around 2 minutes)" but Comprehend Languages is not really gonna do precise math for you.

Esta will give himself a 3-minute Bull's Strength, which is going to take him another 6 seconds after he pulls that cheapass scroll, so he can swim while in armor.  And then, sure, start trying to clamber up the least steep ascent he can find, with his augmented strength.  That'll save him some effort on swimming to the surface later.

...Okay, Merrin has no idea why Estha won't answer her in superheated Baseline and is insisting on speaking a conlang, and her only hypothesis is ??hypoxia?? which is not actually an explanation.

Especially when he's suddenly making rapid progress up the limestone slope! Wow! Merrin could maybe do that, but she's an endurance-specialized Exception Handling medtech, and she's not sure she could have done it when she wasn't acclimatized to the oxygen levels yet, let alone wearing what sure looks like unpowered armor for a doompunk costume rather than her very expensive Exception Handling gear. Did he start working out after she– not left. After her True Death in a plane crash. That's all he would have known until like sixty seconds ago. He's also got to be really, really confused - did he permanently die too, is the deal here that True Death is not actually a thing and actually you just respawn on exoplanets - why would Reality work that way it's so stupid – focus focus focus. 

Merrin is still herself covering ground as fast as she can, even though there's no way she's going to make it to his location in the time she has, it'll still better to be separated by fewer meters. 

She is not, in fact, planning to go any further down the bank than the high-water line she anticipates for a near-to-spring-tide tidal bore, plus a couple of meters of space for error. She can see a lot better from here, and if he's fine then he'll be fine on the opposite bank and they can awkwardly shout at each other until the water settles a little and she can safely swim over to him without getting swept 500 meters upstream in the attempt. And if he's not fine, then - well - she hasn't actually decided if she would jump into a tidal bore wave after him because surely the most likely consequence is a Stupid Accident and neither of them making it out of the river but–

Merrin's power armor is not, actually, specifically design to let her run faster than an unaided human; it also doesn't let her lift 1000 kg rocks or anything. There are engineering tradeoffs, in power armor design, and hers is meant to be maneuverable and powerful in water, and to provide her with some protection against blunt force trauma, and to still be a weight that she could conceivably carry a short distance if it had a mechanical problem and the power assist stopped working, and most of all its entire design philosophy is optimized around eking out as many hours as it possibly can on a single battery charge.

And the terrain is awful for moving fast; Merrin is used to it, and she's calibrated enough on what she can pull off that she hasn't fallen, but she's needed to slow down several times to navigate all the areas of jagged hand-sized thermally-cracked shards of limestone that would shift underfoot and send her pitching over if she were running at full speed.

...She's already sweating inside her armor, which is now pinging a gentle alarm that it's already running maximum cooling and cannot run it any harder. This is expected; the outside temperature is 43° C and the humidity is almost 100% and it's simply flat-out not specced for those conditions. 

(You could totally solve it by jumping into the tide! Imaginary Kalorm pipes up hopefully. Save your boyfriend AND avoid heatstroke! How can you say no to that?) 

The moon's position, the prevailing winds over the ocean, recent rain drainage, etc etc etc, are all working against Merrin, here. 

The wavefront, by the time it approaches them after squeezing its way through over a kilometer of narrowing river-channel walls, is moving at 70 kilometers per hour, which is 19 meters per second. It's rapidly growing in height, as several billion liters of water try to squirt down a channel which at its base, at the point where Esta is trying to climb, is only a few hundred meters wide. 

Also, the walls of the river channel around the cave are not straight, and there are several enormous boulders lodged deep into the sediment by even greater tides in even greater storms than the ones Merrin has seen yet. Esta's view more than a hundred meters down the channel is blocked, and the wave will cross a hundred meters in approximately 5 seconds. 

If Merrin tries to turn around and look behind her then she will fall on her face like a fool and possibly manage to topple head-over-heels down 40 meters of stepped limestone directly into the wavefront. 

In theory her armor, among its many functionalities, has a rear camera with a head's-up display in her helmet. It's pretty good at catching, like, unexpected movement behind her.

The small projected image taking up less than a quarter of her visual field is not great for estimating exact speeds and distances. She's not going to try to give Estha a countdown, anyway, because her model of how people function in emergencies does not think this would cause him to climb any faster. 

But she does recognize the point at which it's really, obviously, too late for her to reach him. 

She stops trying to run. She's almost level with his position, anyway, maybe only thirty meters downstream (or, well, very soon to be temporarily upstream.) 

"INCOMING!" she shouts. "STOP AND HOLD ON!" 

It's a really stupid instruction. Her mouth just sort of said it before she had vetted the content. He wouldn't be able to hold onto the rocks even if they came with perfectly designed grip-handles, because humans cannot actually do that against forces like the ones involved here. But Merrin's model of people reacting in emergencies is that they're more likely to stay calm if there's a simple instruction along with a warning and so apparently her brain insisted on generating one. 

(Also, this isn't why, because Merrin could not even slightly figure out what he was doing before with the whatever-it-was he was holding, and she doesn't have the slightest idea that Esta might now need to do anything to prepare that would take exactly six seconds. But she's calling it out long enough in advance that he will have, like, ten seconds in total between her shout and when the wall of water hits.) 

She is calling in tones of authority, instruction, and demand, of him; words that make no sense even with Comprehend Languages.  But combined with the roaring sound of water, he'll guess she should be calling for round buffs, and he'll start casting his one-minute Air Bubble.

He won't stop or lose his casting, even when he sees that this is really quite a lot of water moving very fast, and realizes too late that he needed more buffs.

Esta will not try to grab a rock.  It is very clear he could not hold to it.  Esta will try to grab his Bag of Holding, instead, because that above all else needs to not come loose from his belt.

(Merrin is so confused and has no idea what he's even trying to do and, from her perspective, he is definitely about to get knocked unconscious via violent impact with something and then drown in a totally normal length of time.) 

This is such a bad idea. If she gets smashed into rocks hard enough it might actually break her armor / or give her a concussion, the helmet will protect her from skull fractures but not the g-forces her brain would be subjected to inside her skull from an abrupt stop - and then she, also, will just drown. 

...The imaginary voice of Laeirthe is, surprisingly, not against it? She's not getting anything very clear - it always takes time and effort to run the mental voice of Laeirthe providing input - but it's - 

- this is the only thing she's done in six planetary months that has real stakes, affecting anyone but herself - 

Yeah okay shit she's jumping into a 30-meter, 70-kilometer-per-hour tidal bore.

...In a few seconds, once the main body of water is below her and she can probably actually get enough clearance in a really big leap not to just land on the sloping bank further down. (If she climbs down the bank it'll take her at least a minute even if she's moving recklessly fast, which is long enough for him to be way ahead of her and her chances of finding him quickly enough are minuscule. If she's going to be reckless, she might as well commit.) 

Caaaaaaaan she manage to keep her eyes on him even slightly after the water hits? 

Well, his Continual Flame skullcap does come with a neck strap... which looks undignified, and also makes your life worse if some creature swoops out of a cave ceiling and tries to grab the Continual Flame.  So Esta did not do up the neck strap inside the cave.  If somebody had given Esta more than one and a half moments of notice, or told him about impending rescue from a foreign adventurer his brain thinks is Mariona, Esta might have done up the neck strap to greatly improve the ease of tracking him in water.

Maybe she's got Detect Magic?  That would make him pretty easy to locate regardless.  He has got various magic items on him, and his incredibly expensive back-of-head-band in particular stays on his head Just Because rather than for reasons associated with physics.

So Esta has not done up his neck strap in order to make it easier for Mariona to locate him.

He has instead done up the neck strap earlier, just in order to not lose the Continual Flame once he is underwater; and secured a few of his other items about himself, or put the heaviest ones (like his mace) into his wonderful weight-reducing Holding Bag, while he was trying to clamber uphill.  The point is, maybe-Mariona's minimal conveyance of information was suboptimal, this happened by luck rather than due to any skill of hers, and if this actually is Mariona, Esta will no doubt have words for her later while they are going through the after-action report.  Words and pain.

Anyway!  Let's consider the effect of water moving at 19 meters per second, impacting on a 6th-circle cleric.

Creation thinks of fall damage as something that grows linearly with distance.  This is in fact completely sensible, given the way that potential energy and kinetic energy work; though it's anyone's guess about whether that's why Creation works that way.  The primordial inevitables who set the rules sometimes got up to some pretty strange stuff.

So how far would you need to fall, to impact into water with a relative speed of 19 meters per second?

You will have been falling downward for a bare bit less than 2 seconds, for a start; after accelerating downward at 9.8 meters per second per second, as is one standard Golarion gravity.

Integral calculus too simple to bother with will tell you that if your velocity is increasing linearly with time, then your average velocity over that time is half its final value; extended over a bit less than 2 seconds, you'll have fallen a bit less than 19 meters.  The resulting calculation, if you do it exactly, works out to baaarely over 60 feet; which is unfortunate, because Esta will take an additional 1d6 damage that he wouldn't have taken if it had been 59.9 feet instead.  If that strikes you as unreasonable, go talk to the primordial inevitables about it.

The first 20 feet of falling into water do no damage.

The next 20 feet of falling into water do 1d3 of nonlethal damage per 10 feet.  Esta takes 4 nonlethal damage.

And then everything else does 1d6 of damage per 10 feet.  Esta takes 7 damage.

Esta has 87 hitpoints.

And a Heal banked.  That is part of the Worldwound loadout for 6th circles.  Heal handles a very wide variety of possible problems, and has no material component to make it any more expensive than the cost of the spell itself; meaning that Heal is hugely more cost-effective to do via 'actual 6th circle cleric onsite' rather than by scroll or item.  Scrolls are for things you need only sometimes.  If it's going to predictably be useful almost every time, it goes in the standard spell loadout.

Esta would've cast Heal on himself to get rid of possible other status conditions, if he'd made until next dawn and spell-prayers, but he did not quite deem it Wise to use it up on himself right away.

Uh-huh.

Anyway, the actual problem is going to be the rapid waters that repeatedly smash Esta into nearby rocks, thereby breaking his arms and legs and mildly fracturing his skull.

Which still would only be a very brief and temporary problem for Esta and his Cure loadout.

Except for the part where it's hard to use spells with somatic components when you have broken arms.

So!  Has he been knocked unconscious yet?

Do not be insulting.  This barely even qualifies as pain.

He's not swimming very hard, though.

Merrin saw enough of the first rock-smash for her rapid internal calculus to be concluding that this is probably...not...very survivable.

And she doesn't have cryo facilities on this STUPID PLANET because GUESS WHAT MERRIN DID NOT PRIORITIZE EVEN SLIGHTLY in the last six months.

(She can do emergency preparation for cryo with stuff she has, because that would very plausibly have come up in the training sims that all of those lovely crates of gear were SUPPOSED to be equipping her for. Or, rather, she could have on arrival. Now she's dismantled a bunch of her specific-use medical equipment, with specific uses that make no sense to ever need to use on herself, for their motors and wires and reprogrammable electronics that can form part of her automated cave-safety-and-climate control or be replacement components for power armor repair. There’s not actually any point of doing initial preparation that relies on "and then a helicopter shows up within less than six hours to take her patient to a specialized facility”.) 

That thought goes through her mind in under a second and is set aside because it's not actually relevant to what she does in the next sixty seconds. 

She flings herself off the bank with as much force as she can and...in fact falls around 19 meters into water. 

OW

(But Merrin was expecting this, and is landing feet first - a headfirst dive is just an incredibly stupid idea from that height even in armor - with her legs clamped together and arms crossed and chin down, and she has a sealed air supply, and the highly-engineered composite material and lining of her power armor do some impact-redirection. It's 'ow' but she's not injured.) 

Armor reconfigured to aquatic mode (it's mostly the retractable flippers, which you don't want to be extended when you hit the water feet-first with great force). Merrin gets herself angled so she's streamlined. She dodges a rock - she has a lot more maneuverability than someone in unpowered armor that is not designed for swimming in Extra Challenging Conditions, and also she's really familiar with this river, even if she normally rides the less intense post-tidal-bore current back inland. 

Can she see anything? 

Lol 

She's on the totally wrong side of the channel, and at least fifty meters behind where she last saw Estha - assuming he's moving at roughly the same forward speed as her, they are both in short order going to be, like, kilometers upstream of her camp - and her visibility is maybe five meters. 

Merrin power-swims diagonally across the river channel, not fighting the current exactly - its main direction is forward, she wants to go forward, she and the water are in agreement on that - but combatting the turbulence that wants to toss her around in random non-forward directions. 

And she switches on her very powerful Headlamp: Underwater Search Mode. 

(It's not as powerful as a searchlight on a helicopter, because even the cleverest engineering cannot really make that possible as one component of many in a suit not much heavier than Merrin herself. It's still drawing enough wattage to substantially reduce her active battery life if she just leaves it on for no reason. But she's going to be using it for, like, ten minutes max. If she hasn't found Estha in an entire ten minutes then she's looking for a dead body, not someone she can still save.)  

Even a Very Powerful Searchlight cannot just solve the fact that the water is pretty murky with algae and sediment and all the bubbles. But she can see a lot further than five meters, and it penetrates a lot more meters of water than the light of a Continual Flame skullcap, which will be a help to Merrin only once she gets substantially closer than this. 

(It's not part of Merrin's model that the light-up hat the man she currently believes is probably her dath ilani boyfriend was wearing is going to still be working. She's assuming it was a normal electronic-battery-powered costume accessory and is not going to appreciate all the forces or all the wetness involved.) 

She's now closer to the center of the river channel, which had narrowed to barely fifty meters at one point and is now actually wider and shallower again, in a section of riverbed with somewhat fewer giant boulders wedged deep in the sediment. Convenient for her; the water that's made it through that chokepoint is now spreading out and slowing down a bit and there are fewer obstacles to waste time and energy dodging.

(Or from Esta's perspective, to crash into.) 

It feels like it's been about five minutes but, in fact, it's been 42 seconds. 

With all the tossed-up silt the water is carrying, Merrin's headlamp can penetrate thirty meters of water, which is not quite enough to see either bank from where she is, but is enough to see clear to the bottom of the channel; the portion behind the wavefront is sloshing wildly but is on average only about five meters deep at this point. 

CAN SHE SEE HIM???? 

No, but he will see a light distantly piercing through the water, on one occasion when he forces his eyes open; and he will... sorta maybe slightly try to move in that direction by flailing his upper arms and upper thighs and ignoring the pain that comes with that?

Honestly, Esta has taken a lot of nonlethal damage at this point, and as much lethal damage again as that, and a few more knocks on the head.  Even he is starting to feel like it might be a good time for a nap.

- what was that? 

Merrin is actually pretty unsure if she actually saw anything, looking for "movement" in the water is kind of difficult when the water, itself, is still moving very fast even past the river-channel chokepoint. It might just have been a dislodged strapwrack holdfast getting knocked around. 

But it's a direction to try swimming in. Merrin will swim that way, angling her headlamp back and forth a bit, scanning the water as hard as she can for solid shapes larger than a strapwrack holdfast that might even be human-shaped. 

(The one-minute mark since Vicar Esta cast Air Bubble from his scroll passes, not that Merrin has any way of knowing this would be relevant.) 

It would've been nice to have the leisure to look at his pocket-watch and precisely time that, so he could inhale deeply just as the spell ended.

He will hold what breath he happens to have, though.  It's not a bad reason to stay awake a little longer.

Merrin is COMING she's ALMOST THERE - 

- nevermind she's briefly redirecting nearly all of her attention to not getting beaned by a collision with a boulder in her path, she was distracted and did not see it more than five seconds in advance - 

- she dodges, successfully, but it involves some very frantic underwater-gymnastics and now she is tumbling through the water, trying to reorient her sense of direction - 

The river is finally cooperating with her, here. Relatively speaking. The water speed is down to only 20 kph in this section of riverbed, and the bottom here is more gravel than silt, with less sediment to disturb and make the water murkier, and they're both now well behind the actual tidal bore wavefront - her maximum headland visibility is more like 40 meters - 

It's still going to take her another thirty seconds to be sure she has her eyes on him again, and then at least thirty seconds after that to actually catch up to his position. 

(She's counting seconds passing. It's going to be coming up to two minutes. Two minutes is not necessarily an anoxic-brain-injury length of time by itself - assuming that somehow he hasn't just smashed his skull open on the rocks by now and made that the least of the brain-damage-causing problems - but she cannot start CPR in the MIDDLE OF A RIVER and she's not even sure how long it might take her to reach the bank carrying someone -) 

He's mostly focusing on holding his breath, at this point, instead of performing the Strenuous Activity of trying to flail his broken limbs.

RAW says:  2 x CON = 26 rounds, two and a half minutes of breath-holding.

After that, Constitution checks starting from DC 10 and increasing in DC by 1 each round, to keep holding your breath, which is a couple of rounds if Esta is lucky.

He might not, like, totally get all of that, under these conditions.

RAW says you suffocate to death 3 rounds after you start breathing water.

Merrin will, perhaps, also not be able to actually reach him as efficiently as she would in less adverse water conditions. 

(Merrin is not aware of the existence of Endure Elements and is expecting him to additionally be incapacitated by the icy water, which is warmer than it was in late winter but "warmer" is still, like, maybe 6° C. At least her suit cooling problem is very thoroughly solved). 

STUPID RIVER!!!! STUPID OCEAN!!!! STUPID PLANET!!!!!! MERRIN HATES YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW!!!!!

She does, actually, reach him around 15 seconds after the point at which he failed the Constitution check to keep holding his breath any longer, but she's focused on grabbing him securely in a way that won't make the severe blunt-trauma internal injuries she assumes he definitely has immediately worse, and not on getting both of them to the surface within the next three seconds exactly, because from Merrin's perspective it has already been more than three minutes and a ten-second difference in when she can start CPR is going to make less of a difference to his survival odds than, like, if he has a spinal fracture but hasn't quite severed his spinal cord yet and she fucks that up. 

That worked??? She leapt directly into a 30-meter tidal bore moving at 70 kilometers per hour after a drowning person, and she did NOT get herself killed and is not even really injured (she's going to have some bruises for sure but nothing is broken) and she CAUGHT UP and GOT HIM and eeeee!

Merrin will allow herself one (1) second of internal !!!!!!!! and ✨ ✨ ✨ and a feeling that might be described as "wow she did not know she was actually that cool!" 

(I seriously don't know what's wrong with you and your self-image, imaginary Kalorm grumbles. You're like the only cool person in dath ilan who isn't related to me.)

Merrin is ignoring that, because she's still in the MIDDLE OF A RIVER and every second is taking her five meters further away from camp and it's now time to book it to shore as fast as she can.

(She can check for a pulse while swimming and carrying him, though)

Is it... not the case that any humanoid who can't breathe water, regardless of how long they were or weren't holding their breath before then, would die (presumably with associated cardiac arrest) exactly 18 seconds after they started inhaling water?

Because if not, Creation is confused!  Creation is pretty sure that's how primordial inevitables imagined biology ought to work, albeit possibly without ever having actually seen a humanoid.  If Merrin's sheer presence and force of belief is mandating Reality to have more complex rules than that, in this faraway place where the primordial inevitables may well be paying less close attention, she needs to go explain on her own how she thinks biology ought to work.

Well! In this case Merrin would be pretty unsurprised at the absence of a pulse, because she thinks he's been unconscious and submerged for three minutes!

But, in fact, her detailed and confident model of human physiology predicts that someone who has just lost consciousness and aspirated a bunch of water - and is already in respiratory arrest and will not spontaneously start breathing on their own if brought to the surface, which is an entirely plausible outcome within eighteen seconds - would still, from that point, take somewhere between one and three minutes to progress to full cardiac arrest, simply because they're starting out with some oxygen still in their blood and that doesn't immediately drop all the way to zero that's not how things work, and there's a gap between the degree of hypoxia that causes unconsciousness - the brain specifically is an energy-hungry organ - and the level at which the heart stops working.

It might go faster on a planet with lower atmosphere oxygen levels, for someone unacclimatized to it. It might take longer in cold water, because hypothermia slows metabolism and thus the consumption of the remaining oxygen in their blood, but of course that part of her model is completely failing to account for the existence of Endure Elements. 

(That being said, these are super adverse conditions, and whether or not a weak pulse is still present at this point, finding it when they're both being jostled around in the water is a pretty high Concentration check even for Merrin, and she's not going to try for much longer than ten seconds because her top priority is reaching the shore.) 

(More than half of Merrin's attention right now is going toward trying to spot a candidate location to get out of the river. This would not at all be a problem if she were on her own! The banks are easily climbable in her power armor! But they're steep, and currently really slippery from the spray that the tidal bore sent up when it passed through this area several minutes ago, and there's no way she's getting herself up to the plateau in less than ten minutes while carrying someone. That's way too long!! She needs an even-vaguely-flattish spot near the current water level that she can drag her unconscious boyfriend onto in, like, at most another thirty seconds. She can worry about everything else - climbing up the bank and getting out of the path of the still-risng tide, and then the fact that she's at least 1500 meters upstream of her campsite and the walk would be entirely over horrible rocky karst terrain - after she gets him breathing on his own.) 

(If that happens. Merrin is tracking that it might just be too late. He looks...remarkably uninjured, actually...he's obviously pretty bruised and bleeding from multiple abrasions after the collisions with rocks, but his skull isn't visibly deformed or crushed. She would be feeling cautiously optimistic if she had medical facilities. In fact, the situation is worse than that, because she packed for upriver exploration and cave-searching. She brought a bunch of first aid supplies that would make sense for her to use on herself if she were to be seriously injured - but still conscious and able to treat herself, there was not actually any point in planning much for situations where she ended up unconscious or completely incapacitated - and she did NOT pack for needing to resuscitate a patient in hypoxic cardiac arrest while completely on her own.) 

This horrifying metaphysics in which people are not either Alive or Dead but instead have a variety of internal properties and conditions corresponding to particular forms of gloop inside their body, such that they could be a little dead or mostly dead without being all dead -- well, let's be frank here, this is necromancer pornography.  Nobody like this Merrin person is going to be clericed by Pharasma anytime soon!

But if this is the dominant view on how reality operates, Vicar Esta is going to be only very slightly dead at most upon emerging from the water.  Like, the sort of dead where he's stopped breathing, not the sort where his heart has stopped, taking this entire set of horrifying metaphysical premises at face value.

Be it very clear, a standard Breath of Life spell will do nothing here.  It has been longer than one round!  Now if this 'Merrin' entity has some sort of Breath of Life-like supernatural ability -- for reviving entities who are, on her own alien view of things, particular kinds of partially dead -- that is between her, and wherever her god is now.

…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. 

She's going to do that. 

She's also going to spend the entire time INTERNALLY FREAKING OUT about it. 

Doooooooooes she come back to find him still in the same condition as when she left him? 

He's resting!  With a Ring of Sustenance running, even!  Probably regained at least 1 more hit point about it, if things are happening continuously over time.

Merrin has no idea that her patient's physiology is not that of a normal dath ilani human! Or, well, she has noticed that multiple medical observations are not what she expected, but she doesn't even have the start of a hypothesis about it, except for ???narrative tropes??? because it would be a worse story if he didn't survive???? which is still not a form of logic she wants to put any real weight on. 

She's going to do all the same things that she would if she did know, because her priorities here are pretty overdetermined. She's just also going to be REALLY REALLY STRESSED the entire time. 

Merrin hurriedly weaves a basket-y stretcher structure between the two tent poles. She very very carefully transfers her unconscious patient from the ground onto it. She lightly ties him on with paracord.

....He's going to get at least second-degree sunburn like that. Merrin removes some of the pole segments and uses them and more paracord and adhesive strips to rig up a little tent over his head and shoulders. 

He's still not oxygenating amazingly on ambient air, though it seems to be totally stable and not getting any worse. Still. If he has a serious head injury, she really doesn't want any other factors reducing how much oxygen his brain is getting. She rigs up the O2 tubing again. 

Aaaaaaand off she goes. 

They're more than 1500 meters away from her camp, as the crow flies.

Which in some sense isn't that far, but she can't take a direct route, not dragging a travois-stretcher. And Merrin is being pretty careful, and also she's stopping every five minutes to check on him, and every ten minutes to run down to the water and dunk herself because her suit cooling is badly overloaded and being out at this time of day with an open faceplate is riding the edge of heat exhaustion, and she's not able to push it that quickly because, again, if she gives herself heatstroke trying to move him faster then she won't make it back to camp at all. She can ignore being dizzy but she's going to stop for a cool-off break every time she starts getting nauseous.

Her patient's body temperature is continuing to be remarkably normal but Merrin DOES NOT TRUST THAT. Once the IV bag is empty, she snips off one end to turn it into a collapsible water-carrying container, and she'll carry up bagfuls of cold seawater and dump them on his torso to, hopefully, counteract the heat of the sun. 

It's going to take her like seven hours to walk that distance, under the conditions described. Also, while she can avoid inflicting any further lethal damage, she is going to be doing quite a lot of jarring his broken limbs and making bone shards grind against each other, and will probably in fact be inflicting nonlethal damage in the process of trying to move him. 

At least the sun is slowly getting less hot! By 48:00 local time, it's down to only 29° C and 75% relative humidity! No longer heatstroke territory for either of them! 

(Sunset isn't due until around 50:30 local time, so at least she has light to navigate by the whole way.) 

Merrin is checking on him a minimum of every ten minutes (and has the vital sign monitors on him programmed to do auditory alarms, though she can't sync them to the wrist display on her armor, that part of her suit's electronic capabilities broke a planetary-month ago and did not seem like a big enough deal to prioritize cannibalizing other electronics to fix.) 

Any significant changes over the journey, especially to his breathing, that might for example prompt her to stop and try additional emergency treatment where she is? 

2 hours of rest (with a Ring on) would be good for recovering 12 HP and another 12 of nonlethal, modulo any more nonlethal that got accidentally inflicted.  It won't wake him up if there's been no other Heal applied to him, but he might start to react to things even if he doesn't wake up.

Merrin is not going to miss that! It's a really reassuring sign! If his level of consciousness is improving at all, rather than getting worse, then he probably doesn't have active intracranial bleeding right now. Not that she can CHECK because she HAS NO DIAGNOSTIC EQUIPMENT, why didn't she put the portable ultrasound in her emergency bag, oh right because it weighs 0.9kg and takes up a substantial volume and she was instead using that weight and volume allotment for her tent poles and emergency blanket. At least she HAS it in working order. If his respiratory status gets worse tonight she's going to be SO inconvenienced tonight by the fact that she dismantled her portable ventilator to turn it into a cave-ventilator. 

(She's still mentally tracking that he probably got some radon exposure to his lungs and this could show up as pneumonitis in a day or two, even if she at no point actually detected radioactivity and that puts a cap on how severe the exposure could have been. There's absolutely nothing she can do about it one way or another; the damage is already done.) 

Merrin makes it back to her campsite at 48:12, a little over two hours before sunset. 

Her shelter is as she left it, still in "day" mode with the tarp stretched overtop of it for maximum sun reflection (with an air gap for additional heat insulation, so that any solar heat absorbed by the tarp itself will not be in direct contact with the roof.)  

The temperature inside is only 19° C and the humidity is 62%. She'll be downright comfortable! All of her gear is exactly where she left it. It's not like there's anyone else around to mess with it.

Merrin had a three-hour nap between 27:00 and 30:00 local time, but that was 17 hours ago, and before that she woke with the planetary dawn at like 13:00, so she's been awake with only the one nap for the last 35 hours. 

She's tired. And hungry, and thirsty, and frustrated, and she's been using a lot of her emotional regulation capacity on not being the bad kind of stressed-and-upset that makes her worse at things. 

She's also a trained Exception Handling medic and none of that matters. 

She hauls her unconscious boyfriend into her tent and - ugh - dismantles the sleeping pad and sleeping bag setup from her pod, to have something to put him on that isn't the gravel floor. 

She drinks a liter and a half of water with a bit of sea salt and bladdersac syrup in it. (Sea salt from this planet has a tiny bit of dissolved uranium in it, but not really enough to be a problem, unlike eating filter-feeders.) She considers that if she's feeling dehydrated then presumably Estha is worse off, and she digs out another of her remaining, like, 3L total of safe IV fluids. She probably does actually have what she needs here to make sterile saline but she hasn't prioritized it because she did NOT KNOW THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. 

...She'll do a whole lot of labs, because she might as well when she has the equipment, and she'll examine him with the portable ultrasound. First priority is to confirm if he has a skull fracture and whether the bone is actually displaced or just cracked, and check for additional intracranial bleeding – if it's not a displaced skull fracture and there's no bleeding putting pressure where it shouldn't, her best bet here given her facilities is to just leave it alone. 

The skull fracture didn't take him below 0HP, so there's no ongoing intracranial bleeding.  The vitality that flows through a 6th-circle cleric is serious stuff.

Every one of her labs that relates to food or water, from blood glucose to potassium to sodium, is going to indicate that Esta is well-fed and well-hydrated...

Unless at some point Merrin makes the terrible awful no good very bad mistake of taking those innocent-looking metal rings off his fingers?  Maybe for fear of swelling?  Other potential horrendous mistakes would include taking off Esta's belt of +4 Constitution!  Just in case Merrin is feeling insufficiently enriched by her current state of medical emergency.

Once she's confirmed - to her relief and also some confusion - that there's no bleeding in his brain, then Merrin is going to scan his arms to actually map out the broken bones in order to splint them. If there are any hand fractures, then yeah, trying to get any rings off him before his hands swell enough to a) make it impossible to remove the rings without a saw that can cut metal (assuming they aren't already at this point that swollen) and b) cut off circulation to the finger as a result, is going to be a priority! 

(If Merrin were less utterly exhausted, she might spend more time considering whether additional swelling is that likely when it's already been like eight hours since the initial injury, or she might question her prior that he's dehydrated and will get a lot more swelling as soon as she gets IV fluids into him, given that his labs show no sign of dehydration. But Merrin is exhausted and operating heavily on automatic trained habits right now, and "absolutely do not leave rings on patients with arm or hand fractures, literally why would you do that" is a trained habit.) 

(She's ignoring the belt for now). 

Welp!  That's not going to produce any instant feedback that might tell her she did something wrong.  But it sure ain't gonna help anything later!

His arms are pretty fucked up, but he has good circulation to his fingers and Merrin thinks she can probably splint his arms so that all the bones are in roughly the right place to heal. She would really, really prefer to avoid having to surgically pin bones in place, it's going to be more or less impossible to set up an actual sterile operating theater in her cave. (Not to mention she's tired enough to know on priors that she's impaired.) 

She'll give him IV painkillers FIRST, because she has them and does not actually intend to torture him on purpose here, and he's breathing fine and also she can now switch him to the oxygen concentrator and it goes up to 4L/min if he gets respiratory depression. And then she'll spend most of the next 90 minutes trying to unfuck his arm bones a bit and then properly immobilize everything so it has a chance of healing correctly. 

Merrin is watching him closely for any signs of consciousness. 

He's already rested for 2 hours (= 8 hours, before SOMEBODY TOOK OFF HIS SUSTENANCE RING) and can't just do that part again.  But all that has got to count as Treat Deadly Injuries, which is good for another 17hp -- Merrin has got to be making these rolls by more than 5 -- plus 17hp of nonlethal damage cured too...

Which amounts to a total of 29hp of lethal damage cured, and 29hp of nonlethal damage...

And that's not gonna take his total lethal damage + nonlethal damage under 87, because Esta was frankly not doing totally great with all that underwater battering before he drowned and then got dragged over rocks with a bunch of broken bones.

Next up on Esta's potential healing schedule:  A full day's rest, or Long-Term Care if some Healer cares to put in 8 hours of light work about it.

Merrin is so tired but she's not going to feel confident that he's actually stable and recovering until she sees more signs of improvement to his mental status.

She takes more stimulants. 

...She finally thinks to remove the armor and plug it into her main battery, and she changes into her robe. She actually has three robes, at this point, and they're just her routine clothing when it's not so cold that she needs to be wearing all of her layers at once.

...She is eventually going to get around to cutting off the rest of his clothes so she can get a good ultrasound view of all his internal organs and check for bleeding.

(She'll have to really bundle him up later to keep him warm, or...cuddle him? or something? But it takes a nice long time for the cave to cool down even after sunset, it's still 17° C, she's not worried about his body temperature if he's in the sleeping bag.) 

This will, unfortunately, involve her trying to remove the belt. 

Removing Esta's +4 Belt of Mighty Constitution will drop his CON from 13 (+1) to 9 (-1), corresponding to a loss of 24 hit points off his previous maximum of 87.

Esta seems to be suddenly doing MUCH worse right after Merrin happens to finish removing the belt!  Like falling into a tidal bore twice, or like undoing most of her previous work on treating him!  This is no doubt a total coincidence.

It's a really abrupt and notable change, reversing a trend that's held for many hours, and no matter how exhausted she is, Merrin is going to notice immediately with a jolt of panic.

Merrin's first thought is in fact "what did she just dooooooo?" It's definitely occurring to her that maybe removing the belt was the causal factor here! Since that's what she was doing a moment ago! But her initial hypothesis is going to be "she jostled something wrong and now he's bleeding internally" and not necessarily include "and putting belt back would fix it again."

(If her reaction times were in better shape, she might have done it entirely on instinct before she thought about it and, if she saw an improvement, would have been inclined to Leave It Like That. But she's been awake for 22 hours straight, now, and it's been almost 40 hours since her last long sleep, and it's been more than four dath ilan months since she last treated a patient, and in short, she is perhaps not at her very best.) 

...She still hasn't figured out how to remove his stupid ??costume?? torso armor in a way that doesn't involve pulling it up over his head and arms when he has a FRACTURED SKULL, and that makes it hard to get an ultrasound of his abdominal cavity. 

Umm. ...She'll do another set of labs, because she can, and start another liter IV fluids, because she still has that option, and then she's going to somewhat more urgently try to figure out how to remove the armor so she can get diagnostic imagery and figure out what's wrong in there. 

(She's confused! It doesn't actually make very much sense that she could drag him over limestone rocks for seven hours without causing a problem and then cause a problem by gently removing a belt! But Merrin is very, very tired, and she's noting the confusion but she's too frazzled to multitask and think about it while also doing all of the obvious other things first.) 

Well, the labs are now going to say whatever they'd say about a patient who was getting their water and nutrients supplied by whatever she's doing with IV instead of by Magic Ring; and will also correspond to somebody who's now in generally below-average rather than above-average health.

That's....really really weird....? 

Like, Merrin flat out does not have a hypothesis for why removing a belt would drop his blood sugar and screw up his magnesium and make his kidney function worse! It doesn't look like sudden massive internal bleeding, it just looks like "he was in remarkably good shape, considering the circumstances, and now he's not"! 

She's going to keep doing what she was already doing - examining the armor - while in the back of her mind she gnaws on the confusing observations like an animal gnawing at the bars of a cage. 

(She can add some dextrose to his IV fluids, she didn't use all of her supply on growing cultures of her own gut bacteria as control samples against local biomass.) 

Esta is wearing +1 deathless studded leather armor.  It's not 'go personally punch a Balor in the face' armor but that's not really his role.  It's the sort of 4000gp armor you buy when you figure you ought to spend at least 4000 gp on armor, basically.

Without going into details of 'hardness', even the enchanted version is not quite as 'hard' as mundane steel.  Powered tungsten carbide wins, if that's the sort of eldritch capability the Far Tapestry is bringing.

It is going to be mysteriously way harder to damage than the studded leather it looks like, but--

This is no doubt some random synthetic material which is around that tough to cut; practically nobody on the entire planet would be wearing leather in the first place.  Nobody would even be able to identify by sight what it's pretending to be, unless they'd been running weird Exception Handling scenarios involving animal hides.

Merrin is not the sort of Exception Handling specialist who has done those kind of weird training scenarios, and she doesn't recognize what the armor is made of but whatever, she has too many more centrally medical things to be confused about right now. 

(Halfway through very carefully sawing it off him, it does occur to her to check his head again for new intracranial bleeding, even though that doesn't explain the timing at all, she was nowhere near his head when the sudden deterioration happened. He does seem to have stabilized again at the current point, she doesn't think he's ongoingly looking worse...) 

Okay. Stupid flaming ??costume armor?? is OFF.

Anything blatantly wrong with his abdominal organs? Or his lungs, though he's still not really having an oxygenation problem - that wouldn't be entirely explained by the atmosphere of this stupid horrible planet with its stupid horrible tidal bores - so that's not her main theory for what suddenly changed... 

(She's still, in the background, chewing on the confusion. Is the belt some kind of medical device? Sometimes people have medical devices that don't look like medical devices, and she's not sure what exact problem it would be addressing and doesn't remember Estha having anything like that but she doesn't know how long it's been...) 

This is the complete list of hits for "abdominal organs" on the Archives of Nethys for the Pathfinder 1e rules.  It returns 1 hit, to Child of Yog-Sothoth, which is actually talking about abdominal tentacles.

His abdominal organs look however all that internal goop looks at CON 9 after a bunch of lethal and nonlethal bludgeoning damage.

(ADDENDUM:  It has been pointed out that if you search on "abdomen", it looks like all that goop in the abdomen apparently has something to do with the Constitution ability score, since targeted shots at it can deal Constitution damage.)

....Which shows up to ultrasound as a lot of bruising and some hematomas that don't seem to be getting actively worse. 

Sometimes, in weird Exception Handling scenarios, the thing to do is EMPIRICISM even - especially - when you have literally no idea what's happening or why.

Sometimes that's even the case in non-sim real life situations! Like, less often, because there's no active optimization for the situation to be weird, but it happens. 

Like, you don't follow that logic off a cliff, you wouldn't do something that would kill the patient under normal circumstances on the grounds that maybe these are some other kind of Weird Circumstances where medical logic is totally reversed, but a lot of things are pretty low-cost to just...try...and see what happens. And in fact, if everything else here were normal, Merrin would not be particularly nervous about disturbing his injuries if she were to gently putting the belt back on. 

So she'll try that and see what happens? 

Conceptually, Esta has a maximum amount of hit points, and an amount of damage.  His current hit points are equal to his maximum minus the damage.

This in fact makes Bear's Constitution a much more dangerous buff than granting proper temporary hit points, for example via the also-second-circle False Life spell.  Temporary hit points are first to receive damage; they cancel that damage when they vanish.  If you remove Constitution, all the damage is still there and your current hit points drop accordingly.

On the plus side, if you put the Constitution belt back on, Esta's current hit points go right back up, and the damage he's taken is a correspondingly smaller fraction of his maximum!  He'll immediately start doing better, including on the general-health-related portion of measurements in Merrin's labs.

(She's not going to notice improving labs for a while; she has limited test strips for her analyzer, and if he's improving rather than deteriorating then it doesn't seem as critical to know right away.) 

...Merrin does not understand what's happening here at all. 

She's at this point assigning quite high likelihood that the situation is, in some way or other, ""not what it looks like"". She...is kind of flailing wildly for specific theories. 

What does she actually know?

...Rather, what does she think she knows, and based on what concrete sensory input that she thinks she perceived? 

She died in a plane crash about four dath ilan months ago, and did not at that time expect she could or would be successfully cryopreserved. 

Instead of ceasing to have any experiences, she experienced being on an exoplanet, accompanied by all her gear, which had been "with her" on the plane but not with-with her in the sense of being in arms' reach or anything, it was in the cargo hold. 

The horrible exoplanet turned out to be just, barely, possible to survive on until now, and it's unclear how much longer she can manage. 

This afternoon she saw a man appear who looks and sounds exactly like Estha, one of her boyfriends from dath ilan, except for inexplicably not speaking Baseline to her. 

She was very luckily in the right place at the right time to see him and rescue him, but...not, quite, lucky enough to come out any earlier and warn him to get out of the river channel before he was injured.

He survived the tidal bore. Barely, but - she still feels like what she observed was in the best 5% of possible outcomes. Not a physically implausible outcome, necessarily, just - she would have assigned most of her probability mass to much worse outcomes. Same deal with the danger cave - like, it's not physically impossible that he went in there and got lucky, but she would mostly have expected him to show, like, more than literally zero sign of radiation-related lung damage from inhaling cave air that contained radon and also dust with its still-radioactive decay byproducts, and she's seen literally zero sign, on top of the startlingly minimal apparent lung damage from aspirating a bunch of seawater. 

In addition to his improbable luck in the tidal bore, the man who looks like her boyfriend is weirdly good at climbing up steep limestone rocks, and is in weirdly good metabolic health for his age. Except when she takes off his belt??? 

Also he seems to be immune to heatstroke AND hypothermia. His body temperature hasn't budged the entire time. 

...Nope, she still has no hypotheses.  

Except...it feels like trope logic, and not real life logic?

Like, when you string together all the specific points where a thing happened that she would have assigned 5% probability to, it's not that any of the individual events were physically impossible, it just...starts to look really weird if one is assuming a normal physical model of Reality, and...it has the feel of something where this was the best narrative? 

What is she even supposed to do with that theory, though. 

If Reality is messing with her, that doesn't actually indicate any specific way that she should be altering her medical treatment plan?? She doesn't think??? Possibly she doesn't need to be as stressed about it as she is, but the stress is keeping her AWAKE so Merrin is not, actually, going to invest much cognitive bandwidth in trying to convince her mind to stop that. 

She'll just...keep monitoring her patient and doing obvious medical care - she'll splint his broken legs too, and figure out a way to awkwardly stick one of her armor pee-absorbers in the correct place because, uh, she does not want him to pee all over her sleeping bag while he's unconscious and she miiiiight have turned all of the urinary catheters from her medical supplies into freshwater-still-related tubing - and then she'll zip him back into the sleeping bag, since it's now down to a brisk 11° C in her cave, and wait for something else to change? 

Well, it sure looks like she's investing the 8 hours it takes to do a Heal skill check for Long-Term Care!  Which would let Esta recover a total of four times his level in HP, so 48 hit points, after 24 hours pass...

Oh.  Um.

The Far Tapestry Entity's 'alien common sense' probably says that processes like that should be... continuous... rather than instantaneous... doesn't it...

Then Esta will probably wake up after around 8 hours total, maybe?  Not healed, obviously; but with his nonlethal+lethal damage total going underneath his maximum HP of 87.

1 current hit point means you're ready for adventure!

Ugh.

Vicar Esta requires coffee.

It's about 58:30, local time.

Merrin has, at this point, been awake for more than twenty-eight hours, and it's been more than forty-five hours since her last sleep of more than three hours at a stretch.

This does not actually enormously affect her ability to notice changes in her patient's condition! All that is really automatic! She was kind of expecting him to start waking up soon, she was seeing gradual signs of improving responsiveness, and so she notices within less than ten seconds that his eyes are a little bit open. 

She'll slip off her stool and move into his field of view. "Hey. It's Merrin. We're back at my shelter." She's speaking slowly and clearly and trying to stick to simple grammar, on the assumption that he's going to be pretty groggy, but she's also, obviously, doing it all in Baseline. "Try not to move, okay? You have a skull fracture and you broke a lot of bones. What's your pain level right now?" 

The person now talking to Esta in a foreign language sure looks like Mariona! That is, if Mariona had cut her hair really short (Merrin has been cutting her hair regularly as it grows, otherwise it's uncomfortable in her power armor and, just, she's worn it like this since she was in her teens and she's used to it), and had lost a bunch of weight, and was also showing about 5000% more emotion in her facial expressions (relief, mostly, and she seems really happy that he's awake) than the Chelish Mariona ever has in her entire life. 

What part of his telepathic instruction to BRING COFFEE did Mariona hear as SPEAK GIBBERISH?

Esta tries to lift his hands to perform the somatic component of the spell to Heal himself.

Hm.  Somebody has bound his damaged arms and fingers, as opposed to, say, healing them.

This situation is not making a tremendous amount of sense.

He does remember that altered-Mariona no longer speaks Taldane after her encounter with Yog-Sothoth.  Either that, or he doesn't speak it any more and his memories of her are what got altered.

"Does your incompetence and failure extend to forgetting even the simplest Infernal?" he says in that language, idiomatically.

….Okay. He’s still speaking to her in some non-Baseline ??conlang?? (Merrin did not catch enough of it before to particularly notice if it’s the same or a different language in terms of how the phonemes sound. She's not that much of a conlang person anyway.) 

He - seems to recognize her? At least that's the vague vibe she gets, that he's confused about his surroundings but not specifically by her presence? ...He doesn't seem happy to see her, like Merrin had kind of hoped he would be - especially when he must have spent the last few months believing she was permanently gone?? - but it's really stupid to have hurt feelings about that right now, and even in her current incredibly exhausted state she can set them aside. The situation is objectively pretty upsetting! 

She shakes her head and taps her ear with an apologetic expression. As well as saying "I can't understand you" in Baseline but, like, she is getting the impression that he can't understand her either in which case that will not really help. 

Right.

He will attempt again to lift his arms, while saying, slowly and clearly and in tones of command -- the tone may carry even if the meaning doesn't -- "FREE MY HANDS."

He...seems...really really upset about the splints...? Are they painful - no, she doesn't think it's that - does he want to write something, since they're inexplicably failing to communicate verbally??? 

Well. He's not going to cause himself life-threatening injuries if she frees just his hands - he might mess up the bone healing, but she's just going to hope he has the common sense not to move them in ways that are horrifically painful? and anyway the worst damage with all the loose bone shards she spent forever trying to get lined up again was in his forearms, and she can take apart the splint so his hands are free below the wrist without undoing those hours of work - and Merrin would probably ALSO be upset if she woke up unable to move important body parts? And she's always had the policy of "when it's not actually medically dangerous, try to de-escalate by giving the patient some of the thing they're really upset about not having"? 

She can free his hands, carefully and trying to clearly telegraph all of her movements. And then offer him pen and paper, on the remote off-chance he can somehow actually muster enough strength and coordination to use it? 

(He does have broken bones in both hands, and a bunch of tendon and muscle and nerve damage in his arms, and will probably not be able to use them all that effectively.) 

Esta sees.  Not hostile, then.  His hands indeed cannot be used to heal himself this way.  She only bound them to protect them from further damage, maybe awaiting her own ability to pray for spells -- if she still remembers Asmodeus, and not only things of the Dark Tapestry.  She is not garbed as one of His, and wears no unholy symbol that he can see.

After a few abortive attempts to move his fingers as they would need to move to cast Heal or even Cure Moderate, Esta will acknowledge the futility of trying to do this thing, for now.  Soon enough, if she continues to treat him, he will recover all damage taken.

"Never mind," he says, as she tries to offer him what seem like obvious Dark Tapestry writing implements.  His tone is never apologetic, but there is no more command in it.  "You were Wise enough."

His Mariona would recognize the tone as the way Esta sounds when he is as close as he ever gets to complimentary.

Merrin is finding it somewhat hard to parse his tone - Estha is less grumpy than this, normally - but possibly she's just never actually interacted with him when he was having a bad day?

And, like, she does actually know people who sound like that when they're being as close as they ever get to complimentary; some of those people work in Exception Handling and give her performance reviews. She's not going to take his crankiness about being injured and in pain personally. 

She smiles reassuringly at him. (Mariona would NOT smile like that. It's an extremely un-Chelish expression.) 

...Is he going to cooperate with her carefully putting his hand splints back, now? 

He will initially withdraw his hands, and try to give her a likewise un-Chelishly blatant skeptical expression meant to convey, "ARE YOU SURE", because Esta does not actually know why that would be at all necessary or helpful at this point.

But he's not wearing his Rings, either of them, and that also makes terribly little sense in the context of altered-Mariona apparently being obedient and helpful and leaving him his belt and headband.  There are things going on here that he plain does not understand, and perhaps dangers that he knows nothing about.

(In Merrin's world-model, broken bones take like six weeks to heal properly! And obviously you would need to keep them externally immobilized for that long, if you haven't made the risky-in-these-circumstances decision to stabilize the fracture surgically! It is absolutely going to be news to her if it turns out that having given him some fluids and put splints on his broken limbs and then parked herself here for blah blah hours to monitor him is going to mean that his injuries mysteriously heal completely in 24 hours!) 

She's SO confused and concerned about the inexplicable language barrier. Her top theory would be (hopefully!)-temporary cognitive dysfunction from the head injury and near-drowning, but it doesn't feel right - he's alert, he's tracking his surroundings, he's clearly capable of strategizing ways around the language problem, it seems to be literally just speaking Baseline that isn't working and he's instead speaking clearly and fluently in some other language and that's just not actually how concussions work.

She would, at this point, be wondering whether it's just not Estha at all, but....the thing is, it's not just that he looks like Estha and sounds like Estha except for how he's not speaking Baseline. He's reminiscent of Estha in some harder-to-describe vibe way, too, just - something is off, in a way she can't pin down but that she doesn't think is just not actually having seen him in non-date contexts.

(It's kind of uncanny, actually, though Merrin feeling creeped out is not important.) 

...Maybe she can try drawing something, to solve the communication impasse?

(Merrin is going to be SO ANNOYED if this is some sort of "Reality is straight-up messing with her for narrative trope reasons" thing where it's a more entertaining story if she can't just talk to him.) 

She gets out the paper again - she's gone through a lot of her paper, and hasn't yet gotten her local-fiber-made ""paper"" to a point where she can reasonably write on it, but she's started rationing it more carefully and has some left - and starts drawing. 

She draws a planet with a moon orbiting it - not realistically or to scale but in the conventional-stylized-schematic-diagram format that anyone in dath ilan is going to recognize from educational materials - and sketches in the recognizable dath ilan continents, pretty well she thinks, and then some other planets around a star,  as "this is a solar system". 

She takes a different piece of paper, and draws another planet, with the same stylized format but - larger planet, lots of squiggly-shading instead of continents  - a conventional-stylized way to convey "????? do not actually have maps of this territory????" - with a much larger closer moon, and then a larger star, also a larger distance (she has to get a second piece of paper to tape to the first one to show the scale she means) - more squiggly-shading where additional planets might or might not be, she has suspicions there are both inner and outer planets from her stargazing but she's not really an expert astronomer... 

She shows probably-but-maybe-not-Estha the first one, and then the second one, and then she puts the second big-planet-big-close-moon-big-distant-sun one right beside him, and carries the dath ilan diagram over to the other side of the room, and gestures with her arms to convey "very very far"? 

Does that seem to communicate anything successfully? 

...okay, he's worked out that she thinks they're not in Golarion anymore, or indeed the Cage's whole solar system, assuming the first diagram is meant to represent a normal planet like Golarion.  Plausibly valid, that sun and sky were not correct, and also Ẏ̸̧ö̴̮́g̵̺͂-̵̡̕S̴̪̕o̶͈̾t̸̖̑h̶̩́ô̵͕t̶̫͌h̶͎̑ ̷̳͊m̶̭̍a̸̯̎ḏ̸͝e̴̝͑ ̵̟̓h̴͕̓ḭ̶̀m̴̰̃ ̷̳̓ṣ̵͗e̸͎͗ê̴̪ ̴̭̊t̵̼̕o̴̪̐ỏ̴̘ ̴͚̀m̵͇̋a̵͕͘n̴͎͐ẏ̸͚ ̵̲̐p̷͕͋l̶̞̐a̵̱̐c̶̛̟ẹ̶̊ṣ̷̒ ̸̪͆a̸̩̋ṉ̷̑ḋ̶̥ ̴̪̆f̸̯͗o̶̗͘r̵͖̊g̴̞͊e̷̯̾ť̴̪ ̵̝́w̴̬̕h̷̖͒ę̸̃r̴͇̾e̷̪͑ ̶̘̾h̵̥̚e̵̪͝ ̵̱͛h̷̞̐i̵͍̋m̶̰̂s̴̝̔e̶͙̒l̶͇̆f̸̳͝ ̸͈̽w̴̲̎ạ̴͝s̴̳̈́.

But what is she asking him with respect to that?

His own ability to get them out of this place?

Esta lifts his damaged hands, and tries to gesture with his chin at them, to indicate that sure, he can do that once his hands have healed.  Word of Recall might get them home on a verbal component alone, it's theoretically not distance-limited within a plane; but Esta suspects this case involves Plane Shift and not just Word of Recall.  Assuming his Bag of Holding made it through the water, at least; Esta's tuning forks for Hell and his own Prime Material are there.

Merrin isn't sure what he's trying to convey with that? (She was less trying to ask a question, really, and more trying to explain the situation, because in his position she would REALLY REALLY WANT TO KNOW. It also hasn't occurred to her to draw the part where she died in a plane crash, since from her perspective he PRESUMABLY HEARD and it would have been REALLY VERY MEMORABLE.) 

Going off body language and her intuitive sense of subtext, which to be clear are NOT trustworthy tools for communication, alone, she sort of has the impression that he's trying to convey some sort of...plan...? 

...Merrin is too tired. She's way, way too tired for more. Stuff. 

She kind of really wants to ask him for a HUG but he has two broken arms and also the VIBES are REALLY OFF and it feels too weird to try to mime this desire of hers

Does he look visibly in pain, such that she should offer him more painkillers before she checks that all of the alarms will scream really loudly about a problem and then passes out in a pile of emergency blankets since her sleeping bag is occupied? 

(Merrin is, to be clear, not calibrated on how much distress Chelish people will allow to show visibly about being in pain.) 

He has at zero points given the slightest visible sign of pain, including when she was taking the splints off his fingers or when he himself was trying to move them.

....If Merrin were any less fucking exhausted, she might think to be suspicious of her observations, just on the grounds that it would seem really implausible for all of that not to be painful when he last had painkillers like ten hours ago. 

She is, however, too tired for that right now. He's not showing physiological signs of severe pain - no elevated heart rate, no sweating - and he's not appearing distressed, so probably it's fine? 

...She's going to go dig out a pile of emergency blankets, and put it nearish him, and gesture at the pile and mime laying her head on her hands and closing her eyes?

(She's going to be right there, if he has a problem he's conscious and can yell to wake her, and if he has a problem that results in no longer being conscious or able to shout then probably one of her alarms will tell her? The only thing she can think of that could go wrong and stay undetected for a while is if he does start bleeding into his brain and it takes a long time before it affects his vitals, but she'll just be really really conservative on the low-heart-rate and high-blood-pressure alarms, that should warn her pretty early on if his intracranial pressure is rising... Merrin is still kind of stressed about it but she really, really needs to get some sleep in order to stay functional.) 

Un-Chelishly wide blatant smile of approval!

(He is not sure if nods still mean the same thing, but he has seen her smile.)

Awwww. That is the first moment where it's felt to Merrin like the vibes were not upsettingly off and he's actually glad that she's here and not permanently dead and stuff. To the extent the smile is odd or uncharacteristic, it's entirely explained by being groggy and uncomfortable; Merrin is very used to ICU patients having smiles that look strained and off entirely for those reasons.

(...She had kind of been expecting more confusion from him about that, come to think of it? She's now wondering if, like, maybe this isn't as completely unexpected an outcome as she assumed, and is something that smarter people than her in dath ilan might just know is how Reality works? Or something??? - ugh she's too tired to think about it.) 

- Merrin is actually just going to fail her own Will save against the temptation to go (very very carefully) hug Estha, before she goes to sleep. She is indescribably starved for human contact, see, and she has been using all of her cognitive skills and training to cope as well as she can and she's managing but she's perhaps not really entirely okay, and then today was INCREDIBLY STRESSFUL and she REALLY THOUGHT she was going to fuck up and fail to save him and she, just– look, Kalorm thinks she should go for it, okay. 

He'll maintain the smile that produced this huge reaction bonus, in lieu of showing any actual surprise or alarm.

WHAT THE ABYSS HAPPENED TO HER.

(This version of Mariona is actually quite a lot more socially perceptive than his, in general, having not spent her entire life incentivized not to be. Her job involves people stuff! She had better be okay at it! ...That being said, Esta has a better Bluff than Merrin is used to, and also Merrin is really, really tired, and she isn't going to notice anything off.) 

She double checks all the alarms one more time and then she lies down in her pile of blankets - she'll be cold later, but she actually wants to be sure she wakes up when the temperature drops in here, if she's cold then presumably so is Estha - and she goes to sleep. 

Two Heals, then, next time he prays for spells, and two Break Enchantments.  Mariona is insane or cursed; and reason declares that there must then be an excellent chance that so, likewise, is he.

(And a little tiny jar of dissonance, very far back in Esta's mind, as the thought occurs to some tiny piece of himself that Aspexia Rugatonn is very unlikely to be lurking invisibly in this room to Detect his Thoughts; and that he need not take his usual pains to finish this paragraph of internal monologue with a rationalization about why Mariona is a valuable piece that he is not being un-Asmodean to protect.  It is a very tiny jar indeed, quickly squashed and forgotten; for Asmodeus's gaze sees all; and a 6th-circle is worth Discern Location or even Gate for Rugatonn to retrieve, if he painfully fails to return by his own efforts.)

They seem to be alone in this place, and insane or not, he must take care to protect all pieces he has to play.

Esta will attempt to doze or sleep, if he can; and use his Wisdom for thinking of things that are not how he got here or what he saw just before then.  For if he cannot dance his fingers to Heal himself, it is not a good time to go any more insane.

If Merrin were thinking more clearly she might have remembered to offer Estha food and water - or, more likely, food in water, she has one of her calorie-containing meal replacement powder pouches left - but she is not thinking that clearly. 

She closes her eyes and remains conscious just barely long enough to notice that imaginary Laeirthe is trying to have a thought, or something, and it feels important, but...nope, Merrin's cognitive processing capacity is no longer working well enough to run a coherent Laeirthe so it will have to wait until she's slept. 

(Merrin did think to switch the tent to Night Mode, before she slept – the door is cracked open for ventilation and the tarp is put away – and the temperature is going to drop faster. Not quite as fast as the outdoor temperature, but lately Merrin actively tries to get the inside air temperature down to -5° C or even -10° C by the early hours, since she's normally spending those hours in her insulated sleeping pod, and it's the only way she can keep the temperature inside from rising dangerously high by early afternoon. She has perhaps not fully re-evaluated this strategy in light of having an injured person staying in her cave tonight, though even if she had she would probably come to the same conclusion, given her expectation that he'll continue to be injured for multiple days before he makes a natural recovery, and it's not like afternoon heatstroke would be any better for him and also if he's cold later she can just cuddle him, she would kind of like that.)  

It's not going to be that cold for a long time, though! Even coming up on 22 days after the spring equinox, the night is still 27 hours long. At 59:00, eight hours after sunset and five hours before midnight, it's still 13° C outside. The cave is a few degrees cooler - it's ventilated from the deeper, colder caves below them - but the underground-cave air is coming in above freezing. Once the outside temperature is below freezing - sometime around 03:00 local time, eight hours from now - it'll actually be a warming factor, and the rest of the cave may not hit 0° C until 05:00 or 06:00.

Esta's Endure Elements will wear off a little before 62:00, if it was cast shortly before the Worldwound incident that brought him here, but he's in a sleeping bag rated to -20° C, and he probably won't even notice it's chilly unless he tries to exit it. 

A sudden temperature change on Esta's face will be sufficient to wake him up, especially given that he had previously had some enforced rest and was trying deliberately to doze.  Among the many ways that divine casters are superior to arcane casters is that they can cultivate a normal adventurer's virtue of waking up for small anomalies, rather than trying to stay asleep at nearly all costs.

...that was his Endure Elements wearing off.  It was cast on him within three moments of arriving at the Worldwound, and they could not have been there for longer than three minutes before t̸̬͘h̷̜̚e̸̜͌ ̶̮͆c̷̭̕u̶̱̔l̸̘̿ṯ̷̉i̶͔̽s̵͙̑ẗ̸̰́s̷̭̄ Esta is not thinking about that thank you very much.  The point is, Esta has now been here for 24 hours, it was daytime when he arrived, and it is currently night outside.

Esta's first thought is that they have Teleported to a different timezone.

Esta's second thought is that he is a fool.  Mariona was not asking him about plans by showing him those diagrams across their communication barrier.  Mariona was trying to communicate the important fact that they were on a different planet with a non-24 day-night cycle.  Esta does not remember off the top of the head what Castrovel's cycle is said to be like, but he remembers it not being 24 hours, and that Castrovel's seasons are not like Golarion's seasons.

If Esta was ever taught how praying for spells works under those circumstances, he has incompetently forgotten the fact.

...Esta does know that Teleporting to a new time zone with intent to stay a while will sync you up to its dawn.  And Esta also knows, or rather considers it obvious without quite bothering to distinguish observation from inference, that you couldn't possibly Teleport around from dawn to dawn, picking up more and more spells each day.  Everyone sufficiently high-level would do that, if it were that easy.

Esta therefore knows (still not quite distinguishing observation from inference) that it is not a matter of dawn being magical.  It is a matter of divine compacts.  You can't get new spells "every dawn" by Teleporting, because it's not allowed.  The Compact of Creation would of course have loopholes, for that it was written by Asmodeus Himself.  But it would not have loopholes so obvious that mortals would see them, for then the gods of Good would have seen them too, and before it was too late for Them.

So -- what does the Compact say about his being on a different planet?  Must he wait a long time between dawns?  That doesn't seem any more sensible than being able to get spells twice as fast if the planet's dawns come more frequently... and Esta does not really know which of these is the case on this planet.  It was night when he opened his eyes again after drowning, and it is night again now, but that could have reflected multiple day-night changes.  His intuition says no, but this, Esta knows for intuition and not knowledge.

...Why is Esta not dead.  Mariona would have needed to reach him within four moments of his unconsciousness to use Breath of Life after his death, and Mariona is not 5th-circle in the first place??  Esta is reasonably sure her fortress does not have an emergency Raise Dead scroll.

Esta sets aside that question.

Esta was not woken by a sense of Asmodeus's presence, within those 24 hours, to cue him that it was time to pray.

Maybe the Compact just says at this point that Esta can pray at will, but only once every 24 hours, if there is otherwise no civilization here?

Maybe Asmodeus is out of range of wherever they are.

It is with a strange sense of internal conflict, which Esta is himself suppressing and not thinking about and not allowing himself to be aware about at all, that Esta decides that clearly the correct thing to do here is immediately test his theory that if he prays to Asmodeus then of course surely Asmodeus will hear him.

My Lord, I have been sent far from where this wretched worm may be of use to You, to a place where I know not the hours of its dawns.  If I yet have the smallest use to You, or may be of use to You in the future, and the Compact permits it to be so, I beg of You that power which You grant to even the foulness beneath Your feet, if it serve Your plans; and serve You I will...

WOW that squirrel has gotten itself lost.  Asmodeus can, like, barely hear it from here.

There is a sense then of His presence, but diminished, so faint that for a terrible moment Esta dares to wonder if he is imagining Him.

...no, no no no, Esta is not imagining Him --

Spells.  Spells would be the proof.

It is possible that if the squirrel focuses all its pathetic desires on ONE spell it REALLY wants, that Asmodeus would be able to hear that ONE THING.

Is its tiny squirming brain able to figure that part out?

Nope, Esta is now considering his spell loadout for the day, and realizing in the back of his mind that he maybe should've gathered more information before praying, but eh water under the bridge.

From his domains of Arcane and Devil, Esta... probably wants Analyze Dweomer for 6th?  Because he has already noticed some confusing things around him and Detect Magic might not cut it; also, Planar Binding (of devils only) would work better with additional spells and infrastructure that is perhaps more of a matter for tomorrow.  For his three freely-choosable 6ths, two Heals and a Word of Recall, just in case it is that simple...

This is why all mortals deserve infinite pain.

Asmodeus has no idea what's going on way the fuck over there, when it comes to Him just choosing spells on behalf of this basically inaudible squirrel.

Thankfully, this dovetails well with an information-theoretic rule about intervention costs, which says that You don't have to pay huge intervention costs on sending godchosen spells to Your clerics if You have non-situationally-optimized rules that You follow about them.

Asmodeus is just gonna send over His standard prechosen Incredibly Lost Squirrel Loadout, 6th circle, Arcane+Devil edition, Day 1.

Either Esta was making appallingly bad choices there, and his current situation is astronomically important to Asmodeus, or...

...there is something not correct about this prayer process?

Does Esta in fact correctly remember how prayers work, or did Y̴̨̊ŏ̴͙g̷͙̊-̵̗͝S̴͈͗o̴͈͘t̶͕̐h̷̻͘o̸̪͛t̷̨̓h̶̺̋ overwrite Esta's understanding of that with false information the way that Mariona now speaks a different language and...

...he is going to try treating this enormous load of godchosen spells as meaningful, because that is the usual rule if you get a godchosen spell from Asmodeus.  But Esta will keep his Perception peeled for the possibility that this is not actually at all what is going on.

One of the spells that Asmodeus gave him, which Esta did not ask for, was Liberating Command.

(Sometimes extremely lost squirrels have been captured and tied up, yes.  It is a good Day 1 spell to grant if You otherwise are unable to hear or see what is going on with Your squirrel.)

And another spell -- which Esta did ask for, and from which he therefore cannot deduce as much, but maybe other godchosen spells revolve around it -- was Cure Light Wounds.

Esta is not actually sure how fast broken bones are supposed to heal for non-commoners.  He knows, from his very early days as a cleric, that broken bones and other complicated injuries take much longer to heal for commoners than the simple logic of 'commoners have very few hit points and should reach full in short order' would suggest.  But also that if you use even a healing spell as weak and simple as Cure Light, a correctly set bone in a commoner will seal right up again.  For powerful adventurers, of course, the question of natural healing mostly does not arise.

Cure Light Wounds (1st) has a somatic component but it is a simple component.  If his hands proved to be healing too slowly, Esta had thought to put in some extra effort and take some risk of further (curable) damage, and just force his fucking fingers to make that simple gesture and tap himself.

Altered-Mariona had politely removed his fingers from their splints on request, but had then considered it apparently very needful to bind them up again afterwards.

Now Esta has been god-given Liberating Command, a 1st-circle spell for making makeable Escape Artist checks; a spell, fittingly, with a purely verbal component.  This suggests perhaps that Esta is supposed to forcibly cure his fingers, after extracting his currently-broken fingers from the splints surrounding them, on his own -- quietly, and without giving notice to altered-Mariona.

(If Asmodeus had the tiniest clue what was going on over there, He would not have so much prioritized sending His lost squirrel spells like Commune, a domain spell of Planar Binding for devils, or a lesser spell of Planar Inquiry, that should all obviously convey His command that the squirrel TRY TO REPORT BACK.)

(For that matter, the fact that Esta now has a Commune spell and no expensive incense to cast it, should already be a clue about how little Asmodeus knows of what's going on over there.)

Sure, those would all be reasonable things for somebody to deduce if they were in general excellent health; and reasoning things through carefully, more slowly, and in less of a condition of general extreme confusion and five different kinds of fully suppressed panic.

Liberating Command, spoken as quietly as he can manage the word.  It is the sort of spell that works almost instantly if it works at all.

That's +20 on an Escape Artist check, against restraints not actually designed to resist an escape artist?

Yeah, Esta's gonna make that one.

The quietly spoken word itself, not spoken in tones of distress or calling-for-help, is not by itself going to be enough to wake Merrin. 

However, dislodging the splints also dislodges the pulse ox probe on his finger. A sensor-error alarm would not normally, necessarily be the scariest, but Merrin has no one to hand off to and no backup and she was very on edge before going to sleep, and "her patient dislodges his oxygen cannula while shifting position and then has a respiratory problem" was high among her priors, and before going to sleep she turned that particular alarm volume up much louder. 

THIS MACHINE WOULD LIKE MERRIN TO KNOW THAT IT JUST LOST SIGNAL AND REQUIRES HER ATTENTION!

(It's not objectively that loud - it won't necessarily sound to Esta like it indicates a screaming emergency - but it's a sound that worms into Merrin's brain.) 

It's been four and a half hours since Merrin fell asleep. 

mrrrrrrg? oh crap that's a familiar medical alarm why is she asleep at work what was she thinking - eyes open - oh right, now she remembers, she's not at work she's on ANOTHER PLANET and doing SOLO MEDICAL CARE OVERNIGHT and that's even worse - 

(It's going to take Merrin a good ten seconds to fully get herself awake and out of her blanket-nest to go fix the sensor problem, though.) 

Well, shit.

Esta is going to try to fucking force his fingers into a sufficiently right position at any cost in pain, quickly, and then try that Cure Light on himself.

Yadda yadda make some sort of skill check, DC whatever.

Esta rolls a number.

And he is not wholly healed, but his fingerbones are sufficiently set to try the next spell.

Can he get a Cure Moderate off before altered-Mariona stops him?

Well, she's not going to forcibly stop him from saying a word and wiggling his fingers, because she's very much still orienting to the situation and has no idea he's going to specifically try that, or any reason to try to stop him from doing that in particular. 

She will see him do it, though. She's up, bleary-eyed, not yet fully focused but awake, and scooting toward him without standing up, mostly looking at the monitor-screen she propped against her stool - she's going to run through so much of her stored battery power tonight, ugh, mostly running the oxygen concentrator but the monitoring suite and blood analyzer and portable diagnostic ultrasound weren't free either - she hasn't quite noticed that the splints are off, yet, he's clearly alert and breathing and she's making sure the vital sign readings she does still have up are not scary numbers before she does anything else, but if he makes a gesture that's going to be hard to miss - 

And that will take his fingers to fully cured, along with the rest of his bones, and his bruising.

Esta is now healed of such maladies as may be reflected in hit points alone.

Does Mariona seem to be of a mind to allow Esta to cast further spells without interference?

She's not going to, like, tackle him to the ground about it! That wouldn't help with anything! 

She has gotten herself over beside him and is staring with obvious ENORMOUS confusion at the hand splint, no longer on her patient's hands, and instead on the ground beside him along with the pulse ox probe. And at the sudden lack of bruises???

Is she hallucinating right now from sheer sleep deprivation - it would be a bit surprising, that's never happened to her before and she's done a lot of very extended trainings before and also, like, she was way more sleep deprived before her nap than she is now, but also she's never dealt with such an extended and emotionally-stressful-on-a-personal-level medical emergency after six planetary months of being completely isolated and plausibly suffering micronutrient deficiencies with cognitive effects and, on priors, with her sanity already fraying at the edges, despite all the cognitive strategies she has tried to dredge out of the void and her conversations with Imaginary Laeirthe in order to wildly guess at how a smarter and better-trained dath ilani would be able to simply decide not to have a psychotic break even when subject to arbitrary stressors and adverse conditions...

She definitely doesn't look like someone who recognizes the very concept of casting a Cure spell on oneself. 

The next one he's going for is Tongues, actually.  It is less catastrophic to lose that than the single Heal which Asmodeus granted him, if she interferes; and if she does not interfere, it is the obvious spell for ordering her not to interfere with further spells.

What happens if he tries to sit up and raise his hand to his chest, to grasp where his holy symbol should be?

That seems kind of unwise! But, like, not in a way where it would help to Merrin to get into a wrestling match over it with a patient who has a skull fracture!

...Instinctively, the thing she does instead is very quickly move into position to help him sit up, arranging herself so that she'll easily be able to catch and support him if he gets dizzy and starts to fall over. She does it with the unthinking automatic-ness of someone who's done that exact thing a few thousand times. 

This... does not really seem like a case where he actually needed to hide what he was doing from Mariona...

What of His unholy symbol, the fine pentagram of red gold inlaid upon mithril?

Anything he was wearing as a necklace is no longer on him! Merrin carefully removed everything that was removable and that might, like, choke him if it got caught on something, that's just common sense. 

(It's not far away – the interior of Merrin's cave shelter is not huge, and has no interior room divisions. The armor she cut off him is in a pile on the ground, and anything she was able to remove without destroying it is instead laid out on the top of one of her gear boxes. It is very dark, though, the space lit only by a handful of bedtime-mode LED strip lights, and may be hard to spot.) 

And Esta is now right back to noticing the incoherence between taking away his unholy symbol and his armor, versus removing the splints when requested and helping him sit up in bed.  This is a contradictory set of actions if everything Esta thinks he remembers is true.

...But he will risk making a use of a divine focus, even given that Mariona might have been correctly and helpfully and wisely removing it from him, because he needs to ask her some questions in order to get anywhere from here.

Esta bends over further, and touches the bottom of his left foot.

And, for the first time ever, after over a full decade, actually makes use of the emergency backup pentagram he'd had expensively tattooed onto the bottom of that foot, after reaching fourth circle.

Esta does not know why more clerics do not do this.  It seems like such an obvious precaution to him.  Well, except that then your captors will just cut off your foot if they do catch on; but eh, at 4th circle you can afford a Regenerate if you need one.

Tongues.

(Mariona will probably not fail to observe his mouth emitting sounds that are odd even by previous standards, or his fingers doing elaborate things.)

Merrin is KIND OF ALARMED by all the moving-around he's doing! She did not IDENTIFY any spinal damage, or any serious internal bleeding, but he did have the baffling problem when she took his possibly-a-bizarre-medical-device belt, and Merrin is aware that she could have just missed an injury given how exhausted she already was by the time she got him back to the shelter and her diagnostic equipment. 

Anyway, compared to that, saying a weird-sounding word or wiggling his fingers is really not at the top of what's stressing her out. 

She doesn't actually try to stop him, but she is very very obviously hovering with the intent, focused expression of someone preparing to react instantly to an emergency. 

(She's so confused. She's so so so confused. The only reason she's not saying tsi-imbi about it is because she did that, like, a dozen times early on, and of course nothing happened, and it's been months and she is in fact pretty sure - she was more sure before the latest new confusing events, but still pretty sure - that she cannot possibly still be in dath ilan and having an untreated psychotic break that entire time so it would not accomplish anything, and, like, even if Estha is sufficiently with-it to know what she means despite apparently not being able to speak or understand anything ELSE in Baseline, that feels like kind of a lot to put on him right now. Anyway, she's currently firmly in the mode of "doing common-sense reasonable things that are unlikely to cause an enormous disaster if her interpretation of what's happening is completely off", while in the background trying to drag together the confusion observations but not, yet, take decisive actions about any guesses she might have.) 

Esta thinks of the words he remembers Mariona shouting at him earlier -- 'tidal bore' -- and wills himself to speak in that language as he says, in Baseline, "Report."

(As is not, in fact, the exact standard word you'd speak to tell a subordinate in Exception Handling to give you a compressed report; as is the closest analogy for what Esta thinks he's trying to do.)

(It's not particularly idiomatic Baseline for any particular situation, in fact.  Maybe a hospital analogy would be if a doctor walked into an ongoing emergency, and as their first action inside the room, said, "Summarize!")

???????????????????????????????????

Merrin has had six and a half hours of sleep out of the last forty-nine hours and is (mostly accidentally, she's been super distracted) running a serious calorie deficit today. She's...not going to successfully think about Big Important Questions like whether her broader model of Reality is systematically incomplete. So she's not trying, right now, she'll just take at face value that yesterday Estha was having some kind of communication-affecting cognitive dysfunction and now it's somewhat better and she doesn't need a complete accounting of how or why to do the obvious thing and answer a question he asked her. 

(He's not actually in her Exception Handling chain of command, she wouldn't necessarily expect him to use the standard idiom, but he does know she works there, so she's weakly noting that this could be a sign of ongoing disfluency, just less severe than 'unable to speak words in Baseline at all'. None of this fits very well with her pre-existing knowledge base on how recovery from a head injury looks, but that is really not the only thing she's confused about.) 

She can summarize what's been going on, sure, if that's the first thing he needs to feel more in control of the situation. It makes perfect sense to her - and to the blurry thread of Laeirthe-opinions that is just barely managing to exist in her frazzled brain - that it would be, that's a normal human way to feel and also characteristic for Estha specifically.

The report is going to come out very much on automatic, the sort of scripted response she can spit out while 60% of her attention is on monitoring a patient's medical status (or, in this case, it's more because only 40% of her cognition is online at all) and is therefore not particularly adjusted for any of her enormous confusions. 

"I've been here for four months by my count." Since she doesn't know if there's, like, ???relativistic time dilation??? involved, or whether it's been the same interval in dath ilan. "It appears to be an exoplanet orbiting a hotter more distant star - still habitable zone, obviously, liquid oceans - with a 64-hour planetary day and a closer, more massive moon closer moon causing larger tidal amplitude." Normally she would take for granted that Estha could obviously infer 'larger tidal amplitude' from facts about the moon, but she's modeling him as pretty impaired. "Native life present, I infer earlier in its history, some edible and non-toxic but likely not providing adequate nutrition." 

There, that's the basic backstory. Now for the recent-event summary.

"Yesterday afternoon - about 25 hours ago now, forty percent of a planetary day - I saw you coming out of the cave. By the way that cave has radon gas, but I didn't detect any radiation signature on you and haven't observed any symptoms so I infer your exposure was low. I tried to warn you about the tidal bore, wasn't in time. Went in after you, pulled you out 1500 meters upstream, you were in respiratory arrest but still had a pulse, I got you breathing and transported you back here and provided medical care. We're a little before midnight, local time."

Pause.

"How are you feeling?" 

There are SO MANY additional questions here, starting with why she is reporting HOW THE TIDES WORK instead of MANY things you'd think Esta would obviously want to know more -- four months, what -- 

And what sort of bizarre language is this -- stupid question, it's a Dark Tapestry language spoken by things that think half in numbers and have words for varieties of planets and stars like wizards have words for their Spellcraft --

But Mariona is asking a question that perhaps makes sense for a healer to ask, and he will abide its lack of courtesy for all else that is happening.  "I am narrowly recovered as to --"

And then Esta stops, because this language has no word for the sort of vitality that is healed by Cure spells, as distinguished from ability damage or drain, or fatigue or exhaustion, or negative levels, or insanity.

"...simple... health."

Can he ask why she took away his divine focus?  Or if she thinks it's unsafe for him to cast with one?

No.

Because the language they're speaking has no word for an unholy symbol.

And it has no word that means to cast a spell.

From Merrin's perspective, that is a fairly bizarre way to answer the question! She would normally expect, like, a list of symptoms, for her to use her greater medtech expertise to put together with all the additional information she has from her monitoring and make updates about his overall status? Pain (by location and roughly-quantified severity), weakness, subjective sense of deficits, that sort of thing. Instead he's...making a confident high-level claim about how recovered he is, with a bizarre un-idiomatic phrasing, and hesitating in the middle like he was having trouble remembering the words to finish his sentence. 

She's concerned! Just going off the content of what he said, Estha seems pretty not-okay! 

...He doesn't look sick, is the thing. Merrin has a really, really finely-honed intuition for that, by now, and her finely-honed intuition is cheerfully informing her that he looks great. Like, relatively speaking, her intuition doesn't think she should take him out on a strenuous hike or anything, but he looks like a patient who does not even slightly need intensive-care-resource-level monitoring or attention, and in fact could probably complete the rest of his recovery at home. 

Merrin is not just going to take her gut-level intuition at face value, obviously. But it's loud and it's jarring and she's painfully confused. 

(Imaginary Laeirthe from her fanfiction is...trying to raise a thought to her attention, wow that does not normally happen that unwilled, she wasn't trying for a Laeirthe-input and normally she has to try...the incomplete wordless mental motion is something like PAY! MORE! ATTENTION! Which would be great advice, and all, except for how Merrin does not really have any more attention available right now.) 

It won't help to look stressed or alarmed. It won't help to be stressed or alarmed, in fact, and Merrin is throwing all of her years of hard-won skills and mental techniques at not being. 

"Estha," she says, slowly and carefully, "do you - remember - what happened to me four months ago? ...Might've been a different time interval for you, but - after the last time you saw me?" 

Something is wrongwrongwrong. Merrin isn't sure if the problem is within her boyfriend's brain or, like, with Reality more broadly, but something is wrong, and "does Estha remember the ALMOST MAXIMALLY MEMORABLE event of his masochist girlfriend's True Death in a plane crash" is a cognitive check that she should perhaps have thought to ask him first. 

"Four months ago, according to my own understanding of temporal processes, I showed up at your... home... for a surprise visit involving an amusing amount of pain."

"Two days ago, according to my own understanding of temporal processes, you were about your ordinary work so far as I know."

"Only if it is not cognitohazardous for you to think of it or speak of it, do you remember the causalpathway that led to your arrival here?"

This language has a disturbingly short word for describing Dark Tapestry things you should not try to remember, but that also figures.

.......

When did she - yeah, okay, that did happen, well, it was eight months ago for her - now is really not the time to dwell on how much she's missed him or exactly how long it's been since her life involved ANY SADIST BOYFRIENDS, is it - 

(It will probably be apparent to Esta that Merrin's reaction to the mentioned "visit" is a burst of affection-toward-him and rapidly-suppressed longing.) 

She didn't, uh, previously think that it was cognitohazardous for her to think about what happened to her? Just, like, if this was in fact a phenomenon known to others in dath ilan, the whole "respawning on exoplanets after True Death" thing, then there was presumably a reason it wasn't general knowledge... 

"There was a plane crash," she says, carefully. "In circumstances where I expected no one on the plane to be successfully cryopreserved. I very briefly experienced the start of a lethal ground impact, I think, I guess I can't really say I 'experienced' 'dying' - and then there was a discontinuity, and then I woke up on this planet. With exactly the set of Exception Handling gear boxes that I'd brought on the flight, though they weren't directly beside me at the moment of the crash." 

A pause. "....I don't know if this part is - related to any existing knowledge or theory generally considered cognitohazardous? But it felt weirdly like...a situation where the challenge level was optimized to be just barely survivable for me, specifically? To an extent I would not expect to happen by chance."

Merrin somewhat-markedly-for-Baseline isn't putting numbers on, like, her assigned likelihood to this happening by chance, because she has enough uncertainty on deeper levels to have no idea how to assign priors there and it feels unusually much like making-numbers-up. And also she's really, really tired, and numbers are harder for her than for normal people at the best of times. 

"As you see it, does that story makecompletesense?"  Esta has the feeling that 'makecompletesense' means something way more specific than he even knows how to say in words, but whatever, it also feels like vaguely the right thing to mean.  "Is there a retrospectivelyobviousaccount of why a -- plane crash -- would send you here, four months ahead of when I arrived myself?  With your particular -- gear -- that was not even adorning you at the time?"

(Adorning her???? What is with Estha’s vocabulary choices, this is the weirdest word-finding-disfluency that Merrin has ever observed a patient having. She is seized by a brief and very silly mental image of herself, like, wearing all of the IV and oxygen tubing piled up around her neck.)

“No!” Merrin would really have thought that would be obvious! “But I am below-median-thinkoomph, right, I think it’s not very surprising that I couldn’t hypothesize and test a new model of aspects of Reality I have no training for, on my own.”

The claim that Merrin is simply and matter-of-factly making doesn’t quite feel like it should translate to “lower Cunning than most people”, but it feels like it’s not terribly far off from that claim? (The language does not seem to have a vocabulary for the standard three mental abilities that Esta is familiar with, at least not in exactly three categories for Cunning, Wisdom, and Splendor.) 

"We are suffering from fabricated, stolen, or adjusted memories.  Some combination of those two, applying to me, to you, or to both of us, sufficient-to-account-for-discrepancy.  One day ago as I remember it, you and I, in the same place, came into simultaneous contact with an entity I'm trying not to think about in detail but certainly powerful enough to transport us here and modify our minds.  I would not call it fullyunderstood but it is -- fundamentally within retrospectiveprediction if not advanceexactprediction.  As my understanding makes more retrospectivesense than yours, I therefore defeasiblysuspect that your mind has been affected more than my own, which is also what would have been advancepredicted based on our respective degrees of susceptibility to -- mind control."

What a strange language.  It is so much more Lawful than Esta would have suspected of the Dark Tapestry.  It is expressing thoughts more precise than Esta himself ever previously had words for, shades of intuitive meaning that Taldane would not force him to distinguish and put into explicit words.  Even Infernal as Esta knows it would not distinguish those words, and it is suddenly obvious that this is because Hell's intervention budget cannot afford to teach mortal Asmodeans real Infernal.  Aspexia Rugatonn would fucking love this language, if anyone could safely strip all the Dark Tapestryness out of it...

...or Esta once previously knew all those words and meanings, and has forgotten them as thoroughly as Mariona has forgotten words about magic.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah????!!!!!!

All of that is, like, fair? Uh, accounting for the part where it's completely absurd, but the situation was already absurd, having a theory for how it happened that is ALSO absurd is kind of expected with the territory. 

Merrin was fully aware that the sequence of events she observed does not really make sense. She's been tracking for the last four months that she was probably missing some key piece that would let her form a hypothesis of what the fuck. It's not surprising that Estha would, potentially, have a knowledge base broader than her on, like, higher-level models of Reality than the extremely concrete human-biology knowledge base she's specialized in. 

...Except that the phrase he grabbed, there, "mind control", is...not, actually, the phrase someone would use for a thing in the same conceptual bucket as Keeper talk-control but presumably considered more infohazardous since Merrin was not previously cleared to know about it. It's, instead, a phrase that Merrin has only encountered in fictional worldbuilding – a subtype of mentalisticmagic, itself a subtype of conceptualmagic.

(It happens to exist in the fictional setting that the original Laeirthe character was taken from.) 

Um. 

Like, taking that for granted it is not actually shocking that Estha is hypothesizing he would be harder to affect than her. That makes perfect sense if one is accepting the premise!

Just. 

What. 

Also: Merrin is at all tracking that, whether or not she should be putting any weight on her interpretation of observations she's making, it does seem to her that Estha is more impaired than her? Both right now, and notably also from the moment he arrived? 

Like, sure, he's not an Exception Handling endurance specialist, but he should have been able to recognize an intertidal zone when he saw one, and not need a warning to get out of it? Okay, fine, maybe that part was just the heatstroke and hypoxia, or - maybe Merrin is doing a little bit of the thing she does where she assumes that people who are smarter than her will just simply definitely know more things than her even though that is not how specialization works, but - something about the entire story she's telling herself isn't quite holding together -

She's confused. 

She wants to ask what actually happened, from his own perspective, that he thinks was edited out of her memory (aaaaah????!!!!).

Merrin knows better than to do that, when he just told her very clearly it was cognitohazardous. 

(The imaginary voice of Laeirthe is trying to flag some kind of objection to that but Merrin is not listening, right now. Merrin is, uh, slightly wondering if having the experience of "the imaginary fictional character from her fanfiction is now trying to talk in her head without her intending that" is something that should be taken as evidence that her mind is in fact messed up.) 

"Okay," she says. "...I'm now unsure to what extent I should be trusting my memories after the event I believed I experienced, that you think didn't happen, but - I do have memories of staying alive on this planet for four months - uh, after the point of my memory of the plane crash, I currently have memories of eight months elapsing since your visit and it seems like you only remember four months? - and forming an understanding of our constraints. ...I'm also flagging that I'm very confused about a lot of medical observations I made over the course of rescuing you, and I - don't know what I'm missing - so it's possible that my medical training knowledge base is scrambled and you should be sanity-checking everything I say or do on that topic."  

Wow. That would be upsetting. That would be really really upsetting!!!!! Though, like, surely there's a cap on how confused she can be, she did manage to get him out of the river alive and stuff...

Her medical knowledge has not been scrambled, it has been replaced by something out of the Dark Tapestry.

Alternatively, Esta's own memories about the nature and purpose and principles of... all the noisy flashy things in this healer's tent... were eliminated.

Either way, it makes sense of why Esta's holy symbol is missing.  Because if he saw anything looking as inscrutable as all those flashy things, attached to an injured Mariona, he would remove them.

Esta will give her a half-smile, exaggerated as he has noticed all of Mariona's facial expressions to now be exaggerated.  "Be assured that I am responsibility-acceptingly tracking that."

"You look like you did not get enough sleep before being interrupted.  I certainly have more questions but they can wait until you are --" no longer suffering from the Fatigued condition "-- rested."

And it will give him some much-needed time to think, as well.

He's really, really not wrong. Merrin can tell when she's pushed herself well past her limits and is paying for staying-awake-longer with increasing impairment; having a better sense for that and for navigating the tradeoffs there is a lot of what her endurance training was about. There are times when a 4.5 hour nap would be enough to get her more or less functional again for another block of work, but this is not one of those times, and right now she's still drowning in sleep inertia and actually feels a lot more tired than she did before she lay down. 

Estha does not look sick. Merrin....is currently inclined to go with the cluster-of-observations that include that plus his own self-report plus all the various "wow it's really lucky he wasn't worse off from that" confusions earlier, and tentatively consider that the cluster-of-medical-knowledge that makes all of this seem really surprising is the part that got scrambled. 

...That conclusion miiiight be involving some degree of motivated cognition because she really, really wants getting some sleep to be the correct decision, rather than the correct decision being to push through her exhaustion even longer because, in the event of an Estha-deterioration, an impaired Merrin is still more useful than a Merrin who isn't even conscious at the time? And also some degree of motivation cognition around not wanting to argue with Estha about it? 

Buuuuuuut the fact that Merrin cannot tell introspectively, even once she's attending to it, how much of her conclusion is motivated cognition, does not bode well for her functionality right now. 

"Okay," she says. "...It's going be really cold later, the day and night temperatures are extreme and I can't afford overnight heating or it'll get dangerously hot in the daytime. Um, if you're recovered enough that it won't hurt you, we could cuddle, and stay warmer? I'd like to, because I really missed you," and also she gave him the good sleeping bag and is relegated to a pile of blankets that will be much less cozy once it's -10° C in here, but that's not really the reason she's making the bid, "but conditional on your preference being neutral-to-positive," she finishes. 

The latter phrase is idiomatic in Baseline. The sentiment would, of course, be a spectacularly bizarre and uncharacteristic one for Mariona, or anyone from Cheliax, to express. 

No expression shows on Esta's face as he remembers that thing which very famously happened to Dou-Bral, after Dou-Bral wandered too far out among the stars, and became the worst possible abject lesson to every other god.

Is Mariona now Chaotic Good.

Esta has not been granted a Break Enchantment this day, though he had requested two such of Asmodeus.

Esta really really hopes this is because it is deemed important that he observe and learn more about this phenomenon before unmaking it, and not because a Break Enchantment will predictably not help.

"I expect I will want to stand up some and move around, before it becomes so cold that we must huddle together for warmth.  Apart from that, it seems a terribly logical suggestion."

Esta was given an Endure Elements and an Extended Planetary Adaptation, and they may need to use both of those in the hot phase of the day -- though he has no idea how Mariona has been surviving up until now.  Maybe both are for him, in the hot phase of this planet's very long day; Esta did not miss the part about 64 hours.

Also, Esta has met Chaotic Good people before.  Sometimes even under circumstances where he isn't allowed to torture them to death before Maledicting them!

UM he wants to do WHAT NOW. 

"......You should override my advice if you're confident that you own understanding conflicts with it and that walking is - safe right now," she says, "but I do want to note that you broke both your legs. Pretty badly. I spent, like, two hours getting all the bone fragments lined up so I could splint them properly and I'll be really sad if you mess them up again." 

(She's being somewhat more imprecise in her speech than she would normally aim for, which Merrin's Estha would recognize as the thing that happens when a Merrin is really extremely tired and also on the downswing from a stressful situation and starting to actually relax.) 

Are there any restraints that would prevent Esta from standing up?

Nope! His lower legs are both encased in splints that look similar to the ones on his forearms - and don't look like any material recognizable in Golarion - and there's a shaped block of some sort of absorbent material down there too (for pee-catching purposes), but he's not tied down to anything and will be able to withdraw himself from the sleeping bag with no difficulty. 

All right then, Esta will go about extracting himself from the sleeping bag, though with some watchfulness to see if there are any unexpected stabs of pain; and if there are not, he will stand up, and perform a little hop and then a larger jump by way of final test.

"I do stronglyexpect I would notice if my legs had stayed broken; and on this basis, I determine that on this occasion you are the one with missing, fabricated, or modified memories."

....Yeah, okay, Merrin is going to go with the cluster-of-observations where he's obviously fine and not the detailed model of how biology that confidently predicts he should not be fine because that way she gets to sleep. 

"Drinking water's in the cistern over there," she says, gesturing vaguely at it. "Food is in the grey boxes – um, left one is cold storage, there's some snail, I'm fairly confident it's nontoxic to eat insofar as I believe I have memories of eating it for months without ill-effects - right has crackers made from local plant matter and what's left of my rations from dath ilan, you're welcome to eat those first, they're better. ...I'm gonna get in the sleeping bag now, you can join me when you're ready to sleep again?" 

And unless he has a counterargument or questions - which to be clear would be so reasonable of him, that was spectacularly sloppy explanation - she'll do that and close her eyes and be asleep within thirty seconds. 

Poor Mariona has been eating snails!  Well, such is the fate of those who do not reach Asmodeus's 3rd circle at least.

...or those who forget Him entirely.  For the language they were speaking has no word for gods.

There are words that suggest themselves as associated, but when Esta whispers them under his breath, they prove to mean different things once spoken; superintelligence might as well describe Nex as Asmodeus, unless Esta is missing something about the concept of great Cunning.

Esta is hungry, as he has not been in literally years.  It makes sense, if little Mariona had no concept of what those strange hoops of metal were doing on his fingers, and whether they were good hoops or bad hoops; but it is still hugely inconvenient and will be for a full week.

He may as well get started on Create Food and Water... or no, first he ought to look around his surroundings.  If Mariona has thrown away his unholy symbol and his rings, Esta will be very displeased, for that would be folly and not just uncertainty.  And what has become of his armor?  Most importantly, his Bag of Holding?

His rings and unholy symbol are very easy to find! They have been carefully laid out on a very worn and stained but currently cleanish scrap of absorbent cloth (the specific ultra-durable, machine-woven synthetic-fiber textile is in fact completely unrecognizable to Esta), on top of a table that from a distance looks like ordinary wicker and is, on closer inspection, instead entirely woven out of what appears to be leathery strips of dried seaweed. 

His clothes are in a pile on the floor. (Merrin did cut them in a few places, and initially tried to leave as much intact fabric as possible but ended up concluding that the fabric quality was inexplicably abysmal anyway and it wasn't worth that much additional time and attention and risk to his broken bones to salvage more of it.) 

His armor is also on the floor in a pile. And also appears to have been cut into pieces in the process of removing it from his body, which should not really be possible. (And will remain entirely unexplained, because Merrin's tiny shelter cannot afford clutter and she needs to make her tools last and so she immediately put everything away, including the tungsten carbide powered hand saw.) 

Of course!  What healer stripped of all her magic -- whose 2nd-circle magic would in any case not begin to accomplish such a thing -- could not casually cut magical armor off of her patient if it was in her way?  Why, how would that not be easier and faster than pulling it over the patient's head?

Mariona has some extraordinarily dangerous specialabilities that Esta knows nothing about -- either because they are new to her, or because he has forgotten them himself.

Other than that, there's indeed a freshwater cistern (also woven of seaweed, and lined with a transparent, flexible, and startlingly tough material that Esta will not begin to recognize), with a pipe made of the same material running along a ceiling strut from outside of the shelter and apparently draining into it, though there's no water-flow through it now. 

There is a pile of storage boxes, also with a design and made of materials that are completely unfamiliar. 

The shelter - which he can now see is half formed from a limestone cave - itself looks remarkably stable and solid and well-constructed, for something that is, again, entirely and completely woven of straplike seaweed; there's no sign of something as ordinary as wood, around here, only bizarre impossible Dark Tapestry materials and literal dried seaweed. 

There's a lot of strange black cords, mostly tucked out of the way behind the storage boxes. One of them leads to the oxygen concentrator, which unless he's removed the cannula himself, is still then connected to him. Another leads to an even more bizarre Dark Tapestry contraption that straddles the narrow mouth of a tunnel leading into a darker, deeper cave, and seems to be forcing bursts of even chillier underground air into the interior of the shelter. 

The two grey boxes, if he opens them - they're latched but it's an easy design to figure out and they're not otherwise locked - then one will indeed prove to contain half-melted iceblocks and then chunks of pale meat contained in bags made of the same transparent material, and the other will contain woven baskets and crude baked-clay bowls of very odd-looking flatbread-cracker stuff, and also a small number of even stranger, not-particularly-foodlike items, sealed in some sort of shiny colorful material. 

The lighting comes from odd strips of some material adhered to the woven ceiling or struts. If Esta tries Detect Magic, they won't Detect as magical at all. 

The strange adventurer-armor he saw her wearing before looks even stranger up close, where it's been leaned against the limestone wall, standing up by itself; it seems to open at the back like a mouth, rather than fitting over her in pieces, and it's also made of a material that does not look like metal or leather or anything else he recognizes; it's mostly a matte dark grey, with some reflective patches, and it's very very sturdy and hard but not quite as rigid as metal. Another, thicker black cord runs from it to disappear behind the stacked crates. A small status light is blinking on one side of the helmet, which is fully sealed with some kind of hard, transparent material that resembles but definitely isn't ordinary glass. (It also does not Detect as magical.) 

What there's no sign of, anywhere, is his Bag of Holding. 

He'll get around to that level of exploration shortly.

The first thing Esta does is cast Detect Magic, in case he can find his Holding Bag somewhere unobtrusive -- though he may well end up blinded, or his sight obscured, by all of the obviously magical objects around him.

Right.

Well.

Working theory, the Dark Tapestry Inversion effect transforms items it touches, to run on principles so alien that Detect Magic can't see them at all, let alone analyze them.

...there's a little bit of magic coming from one side of the waist-section of Mariona's transformed armor.  Esta stares at it hopefully, analyzing it for three moments, until he realizes it's his own fucking Continual Flame headpiece stuffed into a pocket.

His Holding Bag -- containing the Plane Shift tuning forks that were his primary hope of departing this place successfully, and a Sending scroll, and many other useful and expensive and did Esta mention helpful things for emergencies -- is nowhere to be seen, by plain vision or Detect Magic.

Maybe it's behind an inch of metal or a thin layer of lead.

Perhaps Asmodeus will see fit to grant Esta many Locate Object spells the next pseudoday; and he and Mariona will be able to find his Bag without it having been swept too far away by that Suddenly River.

Perhaps his Bag was punctured despite its combat chainmail shielding.  Perhaps it has been swept away too far to ever find again.  And if so, they are not getting out of here short of Aspexia Rugatonn using Discern Location and showing up with a Gate.

Esta is aware that he is permitting his thoughts to be disorganized.  Still.  It will be hard to think of things systematically until he has finished thinking the thoughts that just throw themselves at him immediately.

One of his first thoughts is to use the Greater Make Whole spell that Asmodeus saw fit to grant him; it has the very obvious intended use of repairing Esta's armor.

(It's because Incredibly Lost Squirrels surprisingly often end up next to some mysteriously half-destroyed magical object, which could be very useful to them, if only it were repaired somehow.)

...but he hesitates before the cast.  Esta feels naked without his armor, for reasons including but not limited to his actually being naked.  But it is possible that Mariona will speak to him of some other thing that needs repairing even more, or more urgently.  Esta is not accustomed to treating his 4th-circle spells as irreplaceable and valuable; but he does not, at this point, know if he can just get another Greater Make Whole spell tomorrow.

He thinks next the thought that wishes to intrude itself:  Things transformed into Dark Tapestry forms seem to become noticeably more powerful.

Mariona's Worldwound armor was solid workmanship of Cheliax, but Esta rather suspects it cannot begin to compare to the smooth alien metal of the glowing alter-magical Thing that it became, after being t̷̯̏ō̷͙͌ú̵̬͝c̸̽̅͜h̸͈̆͠e̴̘̻͆́d̶͓͉̒ ̶̬̊̂b̶̪͇̓͠y̷͇͌̀ ̵̤̀͒H̵͇͋̔ỉ̶̱̇ś̴̢̺̔ ̸͈̀͠ń̷̨ö̴̩͘ỏ̵̼̱̉d̷̨̎̓ĺ̶̹̔y̷̨͑ ̶̫̽a̶͚͐p̷̱̂͝ṗ̵̘̟e̸̻̠̓̀n̷̹̄͐d̴̲̆a̷̦̐͋g̸̲̀̆e̴̹̅́.̸̭͇͐̔  Her army-issue nonmagical dagger, perhaps, became capable of cutting through Esta's magical armor as if it were linen.  Or perhaps it is Mariona herself who gained the power to cut what should not be cut.

It is not a strict improvement.  Mariona was able to bring Esta back from death after he drowned; but also she was surprised at Esta's healing, she remembered no way to mend a broken bone but time.  Even his 2nd-circle capabilities may seem as miraculous to her, now, as hers to him.

It seems unguessable whether he or altered-Mariona would win in a fight, if it came to a fight.

And then there is Mariona herself.  Who, after having had something happen to her that may be akin to Dou-Bral's transformation to Zon-Kuthon, now seems to, well, to like him.

Or, like the version of him that she now remembers.

Esta does not know why this thought seems to weigh so heavily on him.

It ought to confirm everything he has ever told himself about how the two of them previously had a rigorously proper and nonheretical Asmodean relationship.

Perhaps his intuition is trying to tell him something important.

That is probably it.

Vicar Esta will now carefully search for reasons why his first thought on this matter would be false.

(As far as almost any mortal in Cheliax knows, after all, that is exactly how cognition is supposed to work and the whole point of thinking!  First your brain decides what to believe; and then, you go search for acceptable reasons to believe it!

If Asmodeus had promoted Esta to His 8th circle, Aspexia Rugatonn would have taken him carefully aside; and explained to Esta, and Esta alone, that this is not actually how thinking works.

Besides Aspexia Rugatonn, the only other humanoids in Golarion to figure out explicitly why not to do that, are a handful of Irorians in a Vudran temple who are treated with great suspicion for their unorthodox practice of passing around a +6 Wisdom headband in their daily meditations.

Somewhere on a vastly more distant planet with highly anomalous lunar eclipses, the actual majority of people who could correctly and rigorously explain in words why that is not how thinking works, are unusually attentive readers of Thellim's blog.

So not actually just a Cheliax problem.  But Cheliax does have it noticeably, if slightly, worse than usual.)

Dou-Bral, who previously preferred not to kill Himself, did not prefer to kill Himself after He became Zon-Kuthon.  Why not?  Because the new version of Himself could now do things that pleased His new sensibilities.

Perhaps altered-Mariona and remembered-Esta -- Estha, she called him upon his awakening, and Tongues agrees that 'Esta' does not sound right in her new language -- perhaps those two did other things together.  That Estha preferred -- no, that she preferred.

That possibility does seem to quiet whatever his mind was trying to yell at him, the discordant intuition... yes.  Esta would not have expected Mariona to stab him in the back on a moment's inattention unless she could thereby take his place or gain some great benefit to herself; and honestly Esta would not have expected Mariona to do it even then, but that is because Mariona is silly.  The point is, she did not like the pain and the sex that he inflicted on her, and she did enjoy the benefits of his mentorship.

This version of Mariona, then, probably likes being hurt by him and having sex with him, and dislikes him assisting her career, and so Chaotic Good Estha has been having sex with her and torturing her but not promoting her to command of Worldwound fortresses.

...Esta has a feeling that he has not fully sorted out the key ideas, here.  He doesn't think Caydenites or Desnans torture each other for fun?  But then this is Dark Tapestry inversion and not just moving around the alignment chart.  Zon Kuthon is strange for Lawful Evil, because most Lawful Evil proceeds from vastly more sensible foundations than 'do the opposite of whatever Chaotic Good would do'.

Esta, at WIS 22, does now have a sense that he may have just thought as many as several things that will turn out to be stupid.

Esta, at WIS 22, is not going to ignore that feeling.  By his age, any high-ranking Asmodean priest has already been tortured about both jumping to conclusions and about failing to see the obvious.  The combination tends to leave strong impressions about the dangers both of thinking too fast and of failing to see what is before you.

Possibly some of all that reasoning may be wrong, there.

...but it does explain that strange look of -- fondness? wistfulness? longing? -- that crossed Mariona's face, when Esta mentioned his surprise visit of four months ago (on his time), and that it had involved an amusing amount of pain.  Esta had meant amusing to him, but...

At the very least, Esta should keep in mind generally that Altered-Mariona may remember a very strange relationship with 'Estha', and he should tread cautiously around it.  Even if, here and now, it seems to add up to her being solicitous of his desires.  Because it may well be that, mere pathetic affection, and not fear of him or obedience to Asmodeus's tyranny.

So now, Estha is now going to think about all the things he should be thinking about!  His brain has learned that thinking about how Mariona got altered is the sort of thing that potentially leads to pain if he is not careful in what he thinks.

The most obvious thing Esta should be thinking about is the complicated loadout of spells that Asmodeus has sent him.  Possibly Esta should have done that earlier and before taking any actions, really.  Maybe that Liberating Command was meant for some future event and Esta has now wasted it, since it really doesn't seem like it was necessary... or maybe that superfluity is itself an illusion... or maybe Esta would've hesitated too long to Cure Light his hands and that would've been an error...

This is foolishness.  Esta needs to think about his godchosen spells in a more organized way.

He could start from the most powerful spells, but there is one first-circle divination and one fourth-circle divination that he doesn't recognize at all, and the second-circle Augury he got looks importantly different from a Spellcraft angle.  Arguably, Esta should have prioritized thinking about those strange spells first and above all, in retrospect; it's just that he got so many godchosen spells landing on him at the same time --

Esta's mind shuts down the excuse-making.  Torturers who can read your thoughts are very unimpressed about mental excusemaking.  It does do a little to untrain the bad habit.

What is unusual about the Augury?  Is it possibly a special version that could work without the material component, 25gp of incense which Esta does not have on hand without his Holding Bag?

Is Esta the level of archmage who could figure out the answer immediately?  If not, Esta needs to roll Spellcraft, DC 25.

He could also roll Knowledge (History) or Knowledge (Religion), DC 10, if he prefers.

Esta will take 10 on the Spellcraft check, because to realize that he even needs to make the other sort of check, he'd need to already know the answer.

The alter-Augury spell still looks like it has the hooks that are meant to grab onto a material component, the incense that Esta doesn't have.  The spell just has this... whole set of other hooks, completely unfamiliar.  And other parts yet, now look substantially less like Commune, almost like the spell is not talking to his god at all...

Esta is a fucking idiot.  He's not in Golarion anymore.

Prophecy is not shattered in this place.

And that fourth-circle spell isn't a divination.  It's the divination.  Divination, the spell from which the very school of magic took its name, which no priest in Golarion has received from their god since that past century.

...it also needs 25gp of incense he doesn't have.

Then what the Abyss is that first circle divination?  Esta is now noticeably more motivated to figure it out.

He takes 10.

Then he takes 20.

Then he starts rolling against Knowledge (Arcana) instead, in the sense of subvocalizing a long rhyming list of every 1st-circle cleric spell taught to the barest apprentices, that he has not sung these last three decades.  For a cleric, unlike an arcane caster, needs to know of every spell they might request from their god, and cannot content themselves with only remembering what they have inscribed in a spellbook.

It doesn't really look like anything on the list??

Well, but there are some spells that Cheliax leaves off the list, in the song taught to its little clerics.  Esta ought to consider if it could be any of those --

Ohhhh that's Cultural Adaptation!  Esta has sometimes spoken for the Church to Cheliax's rare visitors, but not at the level of diplomacy, intrigue, or spycraft where he would be using that spell.

(It is sometimes mentally disturbing to young clerics if they gain too much intuition, too quickly, about how cultures other than Cheliax work.  Though their use of daily spells is tracked in any case.)

...is he supposed to use that spell on whatever Dark Tapestry culture Mariona now carries around inside her head.  Is that actually a good idea.

Well, if Asmodeus sent him the spell, it is probably a good idea??

Does it even need to be explained why this is a GENERICALLY USEFUL spell for VERY LOST SQUIRRELS assuming that Asmodeus has NO IDEA WHERE THEY EVEN ARE, or doesn't want to pay intervention costs on adapting the toolkit about it?

...speaking of communication spells, why does he have two Share Languages.

BECAUSE ASMODEUS SENT HIM A GENERIC FUCKING LOADOUT.

Either they will encounter some other entity by the end of the day / spell-granting period, or they might do so; or, alternatively, it is important for some reason that Esta share more than just Taldane with Mariona.

Or, of course, something has gone wrong with the spell-granting process.

Or Esta does not truly remember how it works.

Maybe Asmodeus is not here and Esta was imagining Him and these spells all came from Y̵̢̛̳̞o̵̲̺͑ǧ̶͚̼͕̯̂_̶̡̘͍̺̔̉̾̕S̶͚͍̈̍͗́ͅo̸̢̖͂̌ͅt̶̝̯͙́͗̚ḧ̸̺̯̱̦̃̓o̵̟͑̀̚t̵̠̣̻͌h̵͓̚ sending them over and giggling to Itself.

Commune, Divination, and Augury all require incense.  Esta was given all three.

This in some sense seems like the sharpest knife to cut the puzzle.  It implies Esta will get back his Holding Bag, before the end of the spell-granting cycle; and before Esta can cast Divination to help him search.

...Or alternatively, there is some way for Esta to make acceptable incense out of the stuff of an alien planet?  This seems very improbable, Esta knows the rare and expensive ingredients of divine incense, but not all the ingredients or how to turn them into incense.  Let alone how to substitute alien components; and intuitively, it doesn't seem like they should be anything easy to harvest even on an alien planet, the point is that they're costly...

And if Esta could not get back his Bag, this day, it implies that Asmodeus does not know that Esta has lost his Bag and has no incense.

Now, Esta has had beaten into him, by proxies of the Most High if not her own person, that Asmodeus does not know everything and it is costly to Him to learn.  But if Esta tries to treat this huge load of godchosen spells in the usual way, it reflects an amount of intervention cost that would imply Asmodeus at least trying to check -- on this planet where prophecy still functions -- if Esta had access to rare and expensive material components.

He hasn't even been given Locate Object, which would be the obvious spell to pick up on his Bag immediately, if it were anywhere within nigh a thousand feet of where it had been lost... well, nigh 2000 feet, for that they could move further along the riverbed before casting, and then also try to walk before the spell ran out.  But still; Esta has not been given that spell.

Is there anything else he could use to find the Bag?

Planar Inquiry.  200gp per rough circle-equivalent of the outsider called.  It is an offering, and Esta would only need to decide which of his desperately needed remaining belongings to sacrifice to it.

...The trouble is, Esta does not remember off the top of his head, what sort of devil -- or any other kind of outsider -- would have the supernatural ability needed to know where his Bag of Holding had gone, and tell Esta so upon the spot.

For his domain 6th, Planar Binding, in the form that can only call a devil.  It is a spell that Esta uses only rarely, because frankly he lacks the Splendour for the spell's usual use of tormenting a weaker devil into submission.  But perhaps it could be abused somewhat to call up a devil without Planar Ally's usual payment, if you were sending them strictly about Asmodeus's business...?  But finding his Holding Bag might not be that?  If the spell could be used so freely to bypass Planar Ally payments, one would expect it to be used to summon forth contract devils about soul-sales, as benefit Asmodeus and themselves.

...maybe he summons up one of Hell's more knowledgeable bureaucrats about the Planar Inquiry, and it then knows how Esta is to use the Planar Binding to obtain the sort of devil that could, and would, find Esta's Holding Bag?

If they don't accept "Asmodeus wills it", this would take a frankly greater degree of helpful cooperation than Esta associates with Hell.

The intended use is that you TELL THE DEVIL WHERE YOU ARE and if there is ANYTHING OF INTEREST ON THAT PLANET TO HELL, and then the devil GOES BACK, and Hell KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED IN CASE IT IS INTERESTING AT ALL.

This is why the loadout does not include a Day 1 Plane Shift.  It might be better for the squirrel, sure.  But most of the expected value of an Incredibly Lost Squirrel is not in retrieving the squirrel, but in the squirrel landing someplace interesting or valuable to Hell.  Getting the squirrel back is a distantly second-best consolation prize.

And Esta goes on thinking about his other seemingly godchosen spells, for a time.

He weighs the act, concludes he is sure enough of his reasons, and puts his Rings back on, though the Ring of Sustenance will take a while to work.

He does not use his Greater Make Whole on his armor, without having yet asked Mariona about its other possible uses.

He uses one of his Comprehend Languages to read all he can, of whatever writing is on any strange thing about this place; does he learn anything from that?

He tastes of the water in Mariona's reservoir, to see if it is is a fitting place to conjure the nice pure water from his Create Food and Water; is it?

The water tastes like distilled water that has been stored in a plastic container. (The type of plastic used in the weatherproofing sheeting Merrin's gear included has been extensively studied in dath ilan, and is not known to have negative effects on human metabolism to be exposed to very small leaching from, but it's in fact meant for weatherproofing shelter and not as a component in a freshwater still, and unlike her actual drinking water collapsible containers, it has not been thoroughly optimized with a lining that doesn't affect the water flavor at all.) 

Most of Merrin's written reference materials are in digital form and can be accessed on her reader tablet or her multipurpose display screen, both of which Merrin has been using only when she really needs to and which, the rest of the time, are carefully packed away in a sealed storage box to minimize their exposure to temperature swings and humidity and extend their useful life.

There's still quite a lot of random Baseline text to skim, but it's mostly in the form of labels, inventory sheets on her storage boxes, safety checklists, and maps. 

Some of the latter are standard-issue from her kit; on those, and on the labels, the text is almost impossibly regular and perfect, each letter-form almost identical every time it appears. Some are handwritten, on a substance that...isn't not paper, but isn't like any paper Esta will have seen before. 

(Only some of the paper Merrin had in stock is the ultra-durable waterproof paper. The tradeoff isn't so much that it's more expensive to manufacture than other types of paper – it is, but when Exception Handling is equipping a highly specialized endurance medtech, even for simulated training purposes, that is not really the operative constraint. But Merrin had expressed finding the specialized everything-proof paper mildly more annoying to write on and was also mildly annoyed that she couldn't casually crease-and-tear it to separate notes and needed scissors, and so she did also have a supply of more ordinary dath ilani stationary, which is not immune to degradation from exposure to humidity swings. Her cave has kept it out of the UV, but for anything she wrote up more than a planetary month ago, the paper is now very slightly discolored and starting to curl a tiny bit at the edges, and anything she wrote more than three planetary months ago is now rather weathered-looking.)  

....Honestly Merrin has at this point created enough handwritten reference material to run out of easy places to put it. The survey map and star map live taped to the lids of a couple of her boxes, but a bunch of others are directly affixed to the woven-seaweed ceiling struts, including:

- Her fourteen-step "preparing for an ocean harvest mission" safety checklist.

- Her reference materials on empirically-confirmed-safe methods to process her local foodstuffs, and the maximum daily grams she's empirically determined she can tolerate for the questionable ones.

- Her calendar-chart tracking day lengths, solar angles, daily peak and nightly low temperatures over time, and solar output.

- Her tidal model chart (prominently described as Version Four; she's been continually refining her predictive model of the tidal amplitudes as she noticed discrepancies with the simple "moon perigee -> apogee -> perogee" and realized she also needed a term for the solar syzygy effect).

- Her careful "energy budget" calculations for available battery power for her various equipment. 

Yes, that is exactly the sort of paperwork that his Mariona would produce, if half her mind had been replaced by the madness of the Dark Tapestry.

It has numbers for accounting and numbers for logistics and numbers for eldritch truths about celestial bodies.

She has invented her own constellations to draw on alien skies; and named them in her sparkling new Dark Tapestry language, that has precise words about all of that nonmagical medicine his Mariona has always been so fascinated by.

..."Merrin", it says on the maps, and Tongues does think that sounds more like speech in her new language.

Esta will conjure up his Create Food and Water, and eat some of it.  Of the rest, he sets aside the remainder of one man's rations for himself, and the rest for Mariona; placing his portion by a scrap of his clothing, and her own portion by one of her things; to indicate which is which, if she should wake before he next does.

Mariona has had too little to eat, by the looks of her.  Create Food and Water can make enough food for, well, quite a number of people if Esta should choose to cast it that way.  But that food only lasts 24 hours, and cannot be stocked.  So he makes enough for five people, and leaves Mariona enough for four.

He drinks, sparingly, because he has not been advised where to urinate if he feels the need.

When it begins to become cold, he will go back into the bedroll with Mariona.

No.  With Merrin.

The two are not the same.

It feels stranger, to climb into bed with her, than it has felt to lay with any woman in these past two decades' memory.  There is a tension in him, an anxiety, that he last remembers from seminary, being ordered into the bed of an instructor who had commanded him to please her.  He failed, which students of hers almost always did, at that task, and was hurt about it.

It is perfectly obvious to the Esta of today that this was exactly the thing Madalin found enjoyable, hurting men for failing to please her.  It is astonishing to him, now, that even when he was seventeen years old, this could possibly not have been obvious to him.  But part of Esta thinks that inverse-Mariona -- Merrin, he must remember that name -- will prove to be that again for him: a more powerful woman who finds something to do in bed with you that a man ought to enjoy, and ensure that you do not enjoy it, because she is pleased to make you feel a failure as a man.

Esta mans up about it, crushes down all fear, and climbs into the bedroll.  It is certainly shameful for a man to fear being naked next to a woman who has not yet humiliated him.  She's probably Chaotic Good, anyway.

Well.  Dark-Tapestried Lawful Evil.

The two may not be the same.

Merrin has been operating solo on a dangerous exoplanet for forty-two - now almost forty-three - 64-hour days, which is something that encourages a certain flavor of constant vigilance. She also went to sleep with a not-quite-officially-resolved medical emergency on her mind, which lends weight to a different kind of constant vigilance. 

When Estha approaches to join her in the bedroll, she does open her eyes briefly, and in an obviously-pure-instinct way will glance at him - an assessing calculating gaze, in her head she's just confirming that he appears alert and is moving normally and isn't bleeding anywhere and is still connected to the oxygen and not showing signs of increased work of breathing (and she already half-consciously made a decision that they can start acclimatizing him tomorrow when she can monitor the process) - and then lifts her arm just enough to glance at the wrist-mounted mini console screen where the wireless monitoring equipment (which will approximately just not have been at all in Esta's way) has been feeding, to confirm that it wasn't an alarm that woke her, and also the approximate time. It's a bit past 01:00. The air feels like the right temperature to her for a bit past 01:00 so there's nothing to be troubleshooting there. 

Great, fine, nothing's on fire, he's lost the sat probe - probably it was in his way - but his heart rate is fine and he's not looking short of breath. Merrin did cache in her memory before going to sleep that she had made a decision that sleeping was the correct tradeoff and nothing is telling her loudly that she misjudged that. 

(Merrin would be mortified to realize that she remembered to tell him where to find food and water and did not at all think to tell him about the toilet facilities, but in fact her toilet facilities are still limited to "a bucket in the tent when it's too hot or cold to go out, and a hole she dug a hundred meters away from camp to use at other times and to empty to bucket into", because she at no point had the slack to make herself an actually nice bathroom and short of that was not especially motivated to prioritize it.) 

She wriggles over a bit to make room for Estha, and will cuddle up against him and go right back to sleep. 

...a thing Esta has sort of not been thinking about is the part where he has been given one (1) Heal spell.

It cures, among other effects, insanity.

If Asmodeus had granted him the two Heals that Esta had asked, it would have been obvious to use Heal spells on both of them.

Then, the obvious path-influencing meaning of his Lord granting Esta only one Heal spell, is that Esta is only meant to Heal himself of whatever debuffs he has taken from his encounter, and not Heal Mariona.

Why?  Because it will not help Mariona?  Because her insanity could not be cured that way?

But Mariona -- no, Merrin -- might have received ability damage or debuffs from any number of sources, like poor nutrition.  It seems unlikely that a Heal spell would not do her some good; it is more comprehensive in its own way than even 7th-circle Regenerate.

So it may also be that it will not be advantageous to Asmodeus, if Mariona is cured.  Perhaps Merrin's continued insanity would be useful to Him.

...Esta will see how this matter plays out, of whether Asmodeus seems to be steering or blind, in this place.  And then he will choose what to do with his one Heal spell, before this spell-cycle ends; knowing, as he does, that he might receive no other Heal tomorrow, if he proves unable to ask.

It's sort of obvious that if you only get one Heal spell, and you're not sure you get another, and you even might be under any sort of debuff or insanity you don't know about, that the far more valuable 6th-circle cleric in charge of things gets to use it on himself.

Yes yes, very obvious.  Maybe too obvious.  Esta's intuition says that the obvious decision here may possibly not be the right one.  He hasn't figured out a reason to believe that, but he means to go on trying.

Go away, unhelpful thought, and let Esta sleep.

Some number of hours later, Merrin has had enough sleep that the accumulating physical discomforts will start to encroach on her awareness. (She got some face sunburn while trying to drag Estha back with her faceplate open to run oxygen tubing to him, her head covering isn't as good, and she's hungry and thirsty and needs to pee...) 

She's also incredibly physically drained, though, and is having the Post-Emergency Energy Crash where for a while after pushing herself past her limits on adrenaline, it becomes kind of hard to take actions on purpose. The emergency sure seems to be over. And she's so cozy and she's cuddling her boyfriend. She does not initially try to move at all, or even open her eyes. 

For the first time in months, she’s not alone.

That’s good, right? She gets to be happy now?

…There’s a thought, happening, in Merrin’s head. 

In some sense, obviously “she” is “having” the thought. It’s in her brain.

In another sense, though, it doesn’t feel like that at all. A thread of thought is pulling itself together, and -

- there’s a mental motion that Merrin can choose to do, sometimes, when she has the realization that she’s being an idiot and failing to apply all of the thinkoomph she can bring to bear to a problem. It feels a bit like waking up fully, like summoning her entire consciousness and reflective-self-awareness into her body so she can be fully attending to whatever she's being stupid about and then actually try. 

Among many habitual thoughts in Merrin's head, there's a rather new set of tightly-coupled cognitive processes, new habits-of-thought and mental affordances woven together in a bundle with each other and not nearly as entangled with the habits-of-thought that drive the cognitive subprocesses associated with the usual “Merrin’s experience of her own internal monologue". Of course there is; she’s been effortfully working on this for six planetary months, nudging and poking and imagining from different angles until she manages to generate a useful thought that feels in-character for a fictional character who is really, in many ways, extremely different from the person Merrin is or at least from the person Merrin conceives of herself as being.

Nothing weird or implausible or magical about that. It was just a useful way to access frames of thinking that Merrin would previously have gotten by talking to other people, which was no longer an option, and to get something like an “outside perspective” on her stupid problems, and to feel less desperately alone. 

This tightly-coupled set of habits-of-thought, which Merrin has neatly packaged together under a specific name, is now doing something not unlike “trying to wake up, and to summon its full consciousness and reflective-self-awareness into the body in which it is apparently instantiated right now and the situation in which APPARENTLY it finds itself.” 

Merrin. Hey. Merrin. 

mrrgghhhwhat 

Notice your confusion, Merrin.