That's a slightly annoying communication hurdle but probably the worst that might happen will be someone showing up at her room and informing her that they actually need answers to more questions from her and think it's time-sensitive. They're presumably not going to organize a party that she actively doesn't want right now? 

(Merrin has been wondering a little if, at some point, they're going to prefer that she - pay for her food and accommodations here? In which case she would have to negotiate getting paid for whatever services she can provide that they consider most valuable, which sounds tiring and she's out of practice at it, but she won't protest if that happens. Just quietly hope that they'll decide it's more work on their end too.) 

She thanks Iker for his time, and heads back to her room to flop on the bed, with only the red lights on so she can start coaxing her circadian rhythm toward sleep soon, and thinks about gods. 

An organized list of all the gods who have been described to her: 

Ancient and powerful gods who fought Rovagug:

Asmodeus (Lawful Good) - domain is civic-order, education-and-training, promise-keeping, having a place in society that is yours. 

Pharasma (True Neutral) - domain is afterlives and sorting dead people into the correct ones? 

Gozreh (True Neutral) - domain is non-human-modified-environments, weather, and the sea.

Calistria (Chaotic Neutral), domain of "lust and trickery"

Dahak (Chaotic Evil), domain of "Evil-aligned giant winged creatures who can grow to be very old and powerful."

Ancient and powerful gods not specified to have fought Rovagug: 

Urgathoa (Neutral Good), domain is: healing, honesty, and the Sun.

Unnamed Goddess (Lawful Neutral), domain is "preservation and catastrophe-avoidance."

Desna (Chaotic Good), domain is goddess of dreams and travelers and starlight.

Zon-Kuthon (Lawful Evil), domain is pain, worshipped by sadists and masochists.

Sarenrae (Neutral Evil), domain is gluttony and unnatural prolongation of life.

Gods not described as ancient or very powerful: 

Gorum (Lawful Neutral), domain is banking. Has a country (Osirion). 

Erecura (Lawful Neutral), domain is "secrets, subtlety, prediction"; has a physical domain in the Lawful Good afterlife, in a city/interdimensional trading center; doesn't usually choose clerics anyway. 

....Okay, great, that's a lot. Who does she want to try contacting mentally in order to seek potential employment? 

It sounds like they need her to be - a good fit? But in a way that isn't so much about skills or natural talent, like what a dath ilani employer would look for; it's maybe not actually that good a metaphor. But the thing that Iker was trying to describe to her as "faith" made even less sense to her. 

She needs to be well-suited to a god, in - a way that probably has more to do with her fundamental motivations as a person than her education or past experience. 

Fortunately, Merrin thinks she knows quite a lot about her own fundamental motivations as a person. The place where she's guessing is when it comes to the gods, where she has much less detailed information and is filling in a lot of gaps with her best guess. But Iker seemed confident that she wasn't risking her later chances at "employment" by trying this now? It sounds like the failure mode is just that she can't get a god's attention via mental contact at all. 

It's still feeling very hard to make an organized list of which gods it's worth trying for at all, aside from a few obvious options - she should definitely attempt to reach Asmodeus, as the default god-employer in Cheliax, and Urgathoa, the one whose domain is healing. 

It might be easier to - go at this backward, and try to fill in the hypothetical god who Merrin would be best suited to, and then rank the gods that actually exist by similarity to the hypothetical? ....And, of course, she's been told there are thirty-plus gods, maybe up to three hundred if you consider the minor ones, so for all she knows there's one out there who would be more similar to the hypothetical than any whose names she knows so far. 

Merrin spends a while chewing on that concept. 

...Interestingly, she doesn't think the hypothetical Golarion god whom Merrin would be best suited to is necessarily a god of healing? It would feel more likely if she were still in dath ilan, but of course if she were still in dath ilan this question wouldn't be relevant at all. 

She's well suited to medicine, but only part of that is about fundamental personality traits; mostly it's the investment she's put in, and it's not clear that transfers to Golarion, or at least it may not transfer any more than the other knowledge and skills she absorbed just by existing in dath ilan. And Exception Handling isn't just about healing, and arguably isn't primarily about healing. It's...closer to the "preservation and avoiding catastrophe" concept. Which is very neat but unfortunately that goddess' name is secret. For...infohazard-ish reasons, maybe? Merrin is not sure she wants to immediately apply for metaphorical employment for a goddess whose existence has to be kept partially concealed. 

And - if it were purely her choice, which is the hypothetical she's trying for, she would want her life to be about more than just that. If all she cared about were avoiding disasters, no matter how low-probability, then - probably the right move would be to mostly not do things, here. Maybe learn more about the existing dangers - like Rovagug - and eventually, carefully, see if she can contribute to mitigating those, but if there's an existing ecosystem there it's going to take her a very long time to slot in. Coming from another world, one which almost certainly has a better education system, might help, but it might also just make her a scary-sounding employee to gamble on hiring. 

And...it's not really what she wants. Not in the ideal hypothetical world where doing more things could be done safely. She wants to learn magic and she wants to teach the locals everything she knows and she wants to keep learning, until she can be strong enough to handle this entire situation - 

- actually, that's a useful prompt, because it feels closer to the core of what Merrin is desperately hoping for here. 

Golarion is different. The Merrin who existed in dath ilan doesn't fit, here, and the person she invested in growing up as, there, would be much less well placed to contribute here. Feeling sorry for herself about how she's lost everything and everyone she cared about is tempting but it won't help anyone, including herself. But especially everyone else in this world. 

And - it's very important to Merrin, it turns out, to be doing something to help. 

She was an adult in dath ilan. She doesn't feel like nearly enough of an adult to move forward from this. Which means she needs to - grow up. Again. More.

She can't– well, maybe, at some point, it will turn out that she can trust someone else's guidance, as to what she needs to do and what skills she needs to invest in and what kind of person she should be reaching and aiming to grow up into, this time. But it feels like it won't help, to keep holding out for that. 

There used to be an entire Civilization around her, and she could put weight on any part of it she touched, and she doesn't have that and won't have that. Not until and unless she can build it herself.

...At which point, Merrin suspects that she wouldn't actually need those supports, anymore? It would be nice, but she - can't be doing this imagining that someday she will teach someone smarter than her to be something like a Keeper and then it will be fine and like she's gone home. Merrin is fairly sure that that doesn't work unless she, herself, already understands and does the things that a something-like-a-Keeper needs to do. 

This is probably completely impossible, and obviously Merrin needs to be realistic in the sense that she needs to - know what's worth trying and what's the equivalent of walking off a cliff hoping she can fly, and if she fails then she needs to fail rather than accidentally causing huge amounts of damage.

But that's the attitude that took her through her training as an EMT and everything since. She didn't know, when she was starting down that path, if she could make it to the end. She's not sure anyone else knew either. It still didn't help to dwell on the possible worlds where she couldn't. 

So. 

She needs to become someone who can hold a shard of Civilization in herself and exist like that; she has to put weight on that, and not on people and institutions and infrastructure that existed before she was born and were built by people far smarter than her and that she can always trust more than she trusts herself. She needs to do that and then she needs to build on that shard and make it bigger. (And realistically if this is going to work she at some point needs to solve the antimagical effect thing and figure out how to make it worth Cheliax's while to offer her the various aspects of mental-capability-enhancing magic, or figure out how to do them herself. But that's tactical, not something she needs to plan all the details of just yet.) 

She needs to becoming something-like-a-Keeper, which is going to look completely different for Merrin than it does in dath ilan, probably, but it's the future still available to aim for. 

(Unless she can contact dath ilan with Golarion magic– but that's a small, quiet note at the back of her mind, it's not an important piece of answering the question currently live in her.) 

She needs to aim for that, and she...to her own surprise she wants to aim for something like that? In one sense it's a deeply weird and alien thing to try to do with her mind, it's becoming something that isn't Merrin-like at all, but...in another sense it feels continuous with everything in her life so far. There were problems that needed solving, and she wanted to help, and it was incredibly hard and the process of growing up enough to do it changed her, but she did it and it was good. She could dwell on how it feels unfair to have to do it twice, and without parents this time, but - it didn't feel unfair the first time, so what's different, really? 

....You know, when you put it like that, it would be really incredibly helpful to be the "employee" of a god that was - about that.

Probably that god doesn't exist? It's pretty specific and it's very - dath ilan-shaped. 

Oh well. Merrin will flip through her notes, flopped on he stomach on the bed with her chin propped up on her elbows, and start eliminating the gods that are really very obviously not that, and trying to rank the remaining options. 

The tiny fragment of Irori's attention called to this place would, under other circumstances, have turned away after the entity failed to actually request to be a cleric.

The tiny fragment of Irori's attention called to this place would not have noticed that the mortal originating the plea had a soul only a few hours old, because that requires a larger piece of Irori, staring harder, than is called for by someone thinking about being a cleric of Irori without actually asking.

Irori considers the whole clericing business to be weird enough in the first place, especially when it comes to Him, what with His being the god of people becoming strong enough to do their own thing without any darned gods' help.  He doesn't want more clerics.  He wants, ideally, zero of them.  A near-miss does not produce much questioning within a tiny fragment of Him.

The shell of divine antimagic around the mortal with Otolmens's signature all over it, on the other hand, is definitely enough for that tiny fragment of attention to forward its observations upward at an urgent priority.

Merrin, who as far as she’s concerned has not actually started trying to open mental communication with anyone yet, has no idea she’s attracted the attention of any gods.

She is going to make a LIST.

Gods she can straightforwardly eliminate:

- Dahak. Chaotic Evil does not sound Merrin-shaped at all and the domain mentioned, "dragons", is absurdly specific, which is also the opposite of what Merrin is hoping for. 

- Calistria. Not quite as badly off, but Chaotic Neutral is also probably not very Merrin-compatible, and she is deeply ill-suited to lust and trickery. 

- Sarenrae. Mostly eliminated for the Neutral Evil alignment alone, but the domain is unappealing and not very related at all to what Merrin would want her domain to be. She's not sure that "unnatural prolongation of life" wouldn't cover better medicine, but either way it's very specific and definitely not what she would want to dedicate her career toward. 

- Gozreh. True Neutral seems difficult for a Merrin to grow toward, but mostly she's eliminating Gozreh for the utter lack of any positive appeal. The domain is...fine, she doesn't object to a god existing and having that set of concerns, but it's rather random and not related to any of Merrin's own life goals. Probably it's important that a god's mission and projects are more compatible with also pursuing one's own life goals. 

Gods she doesn't want to eliminate entirely but will put at the bottom of the list: 

- Desna. Chaotic Good is maybe something Merrin could be suited for in principle, for some interpretations of 'Chaos' and with enough personal growth in a very particular direction, but it doesn't feel like what she'd be suited to now. On the other hand, Desna's domain includes "travelers" and Merrin is certainly that, maybe that helps? 

- Zon-Kuthon. Merrin goes back and forth a bit on whether to eliminate this entirely based on the the alignment being literally as far as possible from what feels natural to her, but...the domain does in fact sort of include her? And maybe she got a questionable explanation of what Zon-Kuthon is about. She definitely got a short explanation. Attempting the mental contact seems like actually a reasonable test of whether that's the case and the actual Zon-Kuthon is better aligned with her, but she's still putting him near the end. 

- Erecura. Lawful Neutral is probably something Merrin can aim for at all, and 'predictions' as a topic - 'secrets' too, actually - might end up more relevant to her life if she really wants to try this "growing up into a weird Merrin-shaped sort of Keeper" thing. The rest of Erecura's description sounds...fine? Placed at the bottom of the list because Erecura is apparently not especially looking to hire any mortals and so Merrin isn't expecting this to work. 

- Gorum. She could theoretically make the alignment work, she thinks, but banking is very specific and not something where Merrin has any domain expertise and definitely not something she's excited to spend her entire career on. She'll still try at all, if she gets that far, since it would after all give her translation magic (maybe), and it's possible the state-of-the-art in banking here in terrible enough that even Merrin could contribute something. 

Actual shortlist: 

- Asmodeus. Very compatible on alignment. Seems likely to be looking out for mortals to "hire" here in Cheliax, so probably easier to get his attention? Merrin approves of civic order, education, and people keeping promises, and she would love to have a place in Civilization again, she just could use some support rebuilding it around her first. Which Asmodeus seems - pretty likely to be on board with? Merrin is very confident it would make Cheliax wealthier, if she could show them the pieces of how to be dath ilan and get Asmodeus' help in assembling those fragments.

- The unnamed goddess in charge of preventing catastrophes. The alignment seems workable, the domain is something Merrin cares about, is actively worried about in her current situation, and arguably has existing career experience in. Given the way Merrin intends to attempt this contact, she expects this not to work unless the unnamed goddess is...fairly Keeper-like. So that's a useful test, though of course the goddess might not want Merrin for other reasons. 

- Urgathoa. An alignment Merrin can work with, and a domain she approves of. She's worried it would be...not a good angle for growth, in the directiosn she most needs to grow in? But given that Urgathoa is a god, and she's modeling gods as much more like Keepers than any of the Golarion mortals, it might still be better than going at this on her own. Also, healing! 

- Pharasma. Probably won't want to employ Merrin but she's really cool so. 

Aaaaaaand now it’s time to actually try this thing! 

Merrin feels very self-conscious, actually! She’s about to attempt some kind of telepathic communication with an alien entity vastly smarter than her, and make requests! 

Well, no one was concerned about her doing this, so probably if it doesn’t work it just won’t work but won’t actually waste a god’s time and resources?

So. 

Asmodeus, she thinks, as loudly and clearly as she can. I come from another world, which is worse than this one in many ways - we don't have afterlives for people to go to when they die - but in some fields it seems like we know a lot more. I don't know everything but I want to help Cheliax and Golarion as well as I can. 

I am told that you are the Lawful Good god of civic order and keeping promises and functional education and training institutions. Where I understand Lawful to mean - preferring order, following a decision process that can be predicted by others, that others can work with - I think it's related to what my world would call Coordination but I'm still guessing. And where I think Good means - caring about making Civilization better for the people living in it, and working toward that. 

I'm probably wrong about a lot of that. But I'm trying my best to figure it out. 

If I'm right, then the things that are important to you are also important to me, and I want to help, and if there's a way that I can work for - with - you to do that, then I want to. 

That squirrel is praying to the 'Asmodeus' fake address wanting to do WHAT?  No, seriously, what is it saying there?  The squirrel seems sincere in its prayer but isn't within one alignment step of - and He can't make out literally any of the content of its prayer for clerichood except possibly something about making squirrels more predictable -

Is that an Otolmens intervention?

...why is this squirrel only a few hours old?  And apparently very mature for a squirrel being only that old?  Because that sounds useful if Asmodeus's other tame squirrels could figure out how to do it more.

Merrin does her best to give it five minutes - actually five minutes, "by the clock" despite lacking an actual clock - before declaring that this is not going to work. She's not that surprised. Even if Asmodeus is paying relatively more attention here in Cheliax, it's probably not like he has any shortage of mortals to work. 

So. Goddess whose name she does not actually know, but who she does know is Lawful Neutral (again she tries to give her guessworked understanding of Law as clearly as she can), and who is responsible for preventing catastrophic events and preserving - the world, she's guessing? And keeping things stable and functional and safe for mortals to live in? 

Merrin, too, is in favor of this! She is aware that she is at a kind of high risk of destabilizing it somehow, due to coming here from an extremely different world and having no context on almost anything yet! She's being very careful, though, and she thinks she can make a case that her actual career training in her world of origin is somewhat relevant! On a human scale, obviously, and in a way that works in dath ilan, and she's almost certainly massively confused about what it means here. But she's hoping to adapt to living in Golarion, which is after all going to be her world now and almost certainly for the rest of her mortal life and very likely for the rest of whatever comes after that, unless it's somehow a fundamental property of dath ilani mortals that instead of going to afterlives they go to random other universes? 

Anyway she thinks it would probably help her prevent anything from going horribly wrong if she had some guidance here? So here she is letting the nameless goddess of things-not-going-wrong know that she would not mind becoming a metaphorical goddess-employee and sharing that mission with her? 

Merrin is not nearly sufficiently in a state of constant low-grade panic, nor massive annoyance at other people making messes, to be at all legible to Otolmens.  Even if Merrin knew the syllables 'Otolmens', it wouldn't help; Otolmens doesn't particularly do the thing where she monitors mortal directions of attention for thoughts pointed at particular syllables.

Merrin gives it a slightly shorter interval of time; it seems likely she literally can't get the attention of a Golarion god without knowing their name, and possibly the goddess whose existence might or might not be an infohazard doesn't...actually...make a habit of taking mortals as metaphorical-employees? Wouldn't be unreasonable on her part. 

Up next: Urgathoa! Neutral Good, which Merrin is pretty sure she can get along with! (She spends a while focusing again on her understanding of what 'Good' means here as an alignment.) Also: healing! Merrin is really in favor of that as a concept and has a lot of relevant knowledge of medicine and is just, like, generally strongly in favor of people being okay? She has a bunch of ideas for things she could theoretically do here in Golarion that are not precisely about medicine but would help more people be okay and not starving and things! 

Also honesty, which Merrin thinks is pretty important and also - good for her, as a person, she thinks she would be very well suited as an employee and very happy working for someone who cares about that. Also...the sun? Merrin has to admit she is not sure she sees the connection there, yet, unless it's that...plants photosynthesize and that's how crops grow and this is what results in the mortals of Golarion being fed and thus okay and not sick? Merrin is also in favor of farming being done well. She isn't an expert or anything but she knows some things. 

...Fundamentally she has to admit that she's probably very confused about a lot of what people have tried to explain to her and she's not at all claiming to understand what Urgathoa is working on, but given what she does know she's fairly confident it's something she could grow into, given time. 

Urgathoa does not know what the ass is going on in Egorian right now, but She is not really the type to ask either Asmodeus or Otolmens for answers.

Urgathoa does cast a continuing curious gaze in this direction; that soul is very mature and tasty-looking for being only a few hours old.  If there's some reproducible way to mature souls that quickly, it would make for much more luxurious squirrel farming in Awaiting-Consumption; all those baby souls are sort of meh.

Abrogail has an increasingly uneasy feeling about this whole process, but despite inventing Irori from scratch Merrin didn't actually get clericed by Irori, nor by Otolmens, whom it had somehow not occurred to Abrogail that Merrin might pray to... Merrin wasn't able to reach Sarenrae without knowing Her name, good, so things are still going fine, right?

All according to plan.  Merrin probably can't be clericed anyways.

...She wasn't super expecting that to work. Urgathoa sounded offhand like a better fit for Merrin in terms of being a similar alignment, but of course she is probably still super confused about what the categories mean, and...she has to admit that, after thinking it through earlier, her heart isn't really in the prospect of spending the rest of her mortal life working on mostly just healing-related things. At least not without thinking about the broader picture for a few years. Presumably if this process doesn't result in anything, as she's basically expecting at this point, and in five years she's pretty sure that she should just continue specializing in the general healing-related field, she can try for Urgathoa again?

Next is: Pharasma, the one who created the afterlives. Who survived the destruction of her entire previous universe, and brought in some kind of vastly powerful artifact to make a new one from nothing (maybe? if that legend is true and if Merrin interpreted it right).

Who, most importantly of all, created a world where no one permanently dies. This is really superheated amazing. Merrin is incredibly impressed! She's not sure what god-psychology is like but - even for a god it must have taken something pretty extraordinary, to do all of that. Merrin is very, very, very in favor of the afterlives existing, even if they're not perfect - even if the 'Evil' ones are kind of terrible, probably - there would have to be a really horrifying implementation flaw before it could possibly shift Merrin's opinion here to anything other than 'this is the most important thing that's ever happened in Golarion.' 

Oh and then also Pharasma prevented the world from being destroyed by the god-or-other-entity that wanted to make that happen. Merrin: strongly in favor! It sounded vaguely like Pharasma coordinated the other ancient and powerful gods who participated in that fight. Also very cool. 

Merrin is pretty sure that she's not herself Neutral on either the Law/Chaos axis or the Good/Evil one, she's probably quite far away from the middle of that spectrum, but - if Pharasma wants or needs a mortal metaphorical-employee, and can find a way for Merrin to contribute, Merrin is very available. 

Merrin doesn't try for as long, this time. She isn't surprised that Pharasma would be not especially compelled by the promise of more mortal resources, and she would be even less surprised than with other gods, given how unimaginably long Pharasma has existed, if actually her sketchy and human-limited attempt to understand what Pharasma cares about sounds really stupid from the god angle.

She wasn't especially expecting this to work and the odds are only dropping as she gets further down her list. She's now through her shortlist entirely, and left with gods who are mostly in the category of "they seem fine in general but their thing is not really her thing." 

She's not about to just give up on it now, though. So. Desna! 

Chaotic Good. Good, Merrin is in favor, at least if she’s right that it means [her previous specification.] Merrin…is much less sure that she understands what Chaos means. She can’t say she is a fan in general of disorder or entropy, but someone also mentioned diversity. A world that can fit more different shapes of people seems like something worth aiming for - something she thinks dath ilan does aim for, but it’s hard to pull off. Merrin herself is pretty sure she would sort Lawful by this world’s standards but in her own world she was always weird. And always - chose to lean toward the unusual traits she has and skills she could develop. Honestly she has no idea if that’s related to ‘Chaos’ here, it’s not a violation of anything in her best understand of ‘Law’. If Chaos means - change, growing not just in a single direction but reaching for new ways to be - then Merrin thinks she is generically in favor, and this also seems super relevant to what she’s decided is among her highest priorities now. If Desna is a goddess who can help her grow up into a completely different sort of Merrin than she could ever have imagined being, that would almost certainly be helpful, and Merrin would want to help Desna achieve her goals in general.

As for specific domains: well, Merrin is herself a traveler, though an accidental one, and she is very very far from home right now.

Aww, sorry, dear!  You look like a sweet thing but your alignment isn't close enough to Me.  Yet.

Desna might give you a minor blessing, possibly, depending on circumstances?  For you are a traveler out of dreams and greater distances than starlight.

But first She's going to ask Irori if Irori has any idea what's up with the Otolmens intervention, and also why He's watching this location so intently, along with Urgathoa and Asmodeus who are apparently having some kind of weird angry squirrel-watching contest.

Well. That didn't work either. 

Merrin surveys the remaining gods on her list. She...is really not very hopeful. But she's finding this process overall to be surprisingly helpful, for herself? It's a neat exercise in introspection, trying to look at herself and then look at (her best understanding of) a particular god and find the overlap and hold out those parts of herself as an offer? 

The main result is noticing that she really really wants there to be a god more closely pointed at - the thing she had thought of initially, but which she thinks is clearer in her mind, now. That what she wants, what she needs, here, is to become an adult. She doesn't know exactly what that would look like, yet, because of course a child can't picture the details of who they'll be when they grow up, and if they could then they're already halfway there, right. She's going to have to walk that road, one step at a time, and find out. But she knows what direction she's aiming toward. 

...What alignment would that god be?

Merrin...suspects they would be Neutral on the Good/Evil axis. She isn't, and she doubts that she would ever be, but the process of growing into something stronger is, in some sense, agnostic to what you want to do with that strength once you have it. And - the skeleton of the Civilization she wants to rebuild, the math of Coordination, is...maybe not in itself Good either? Merrin - has the sense that among dath ilanis, she is very unusually driven by intrinsic desire-to-help. She learned the math (sometimes under duress, when she was very little and had fewer coping skills around doing things she was visibly slower and worse at than the average student near her, and thus a DISAPPOINTMENT), but she learned it because that was a prerequisite to being an adult, to being strong and competent enough to help. 

(Merrin's teachers had a time trying to get her to ever defect in cooperation-defection-dilemmas.) 

But at this point she sees on a deeper level why it's important. And that's - probably 'Law', here? So. A hypothetical Lawful Neutral god, maybe. Possibly the 'constantly growing and changing yourself toward greater strength and maturity and capabilities' would be classified as Chaos, here? Poooooossibly. Merrin kind of doubts it, if only because the spell's initial wrong attempt at translation into Baseline is so much the opposite of what she has in mind. 

Merrin takes a deep breath, and decides that when she's done here, she's going to go ask someone if a god sort of like that exists. She's still not hopeful; it still feels very dath-ilan-shaped, not Golarion-shaped. There's probably no point in trying harder for that god's attention right now, she doesn't know their name or even their main domains, she just has a vague bundle of thoughts. Might be worth trying anyway though, before she jumps to bothering someone about it? 

(Another implication: if it turns out a god like that does exist, then Merrin probably has some updates to make about Golarion? She would be confused, if a god like that exists, and that would mean that she's missing something.) 

But first she's going to finish her list! It almost certainly won't work but it continues to be a useful introspective exercise, and maybe even moreso for gods where she really has to stretch to find any overlap with herself. 

So: Zon-Kuthon! 

Merrin knows very few things about Zon-Kuthon and expects the parts she's missing are really important. Lawful Evil: Merrin can work with the Lawful (she holds up the mental specification of it again). It's actually starting to feel a little bit, at least in her own haphazard guesswork sense of 'Law', that maybe on a fundamental level what Law means is that Merrin can work with it. 

She is probably not very Evil but if Albe's description of it holds, then maybe there are some particular aspects of her that are. When Merrin is on a date with a boyfriend, she is super not working for the benefit of Civilization. That's for her. And maybe if both of them are Lawful then she doesn't need total overlap. 

She is a masochist. She doesn't think that she's particularly a sadist but Albe seemed to think it was feasible for a person to explore both and she isn't sure that's false? Presumably Zon-Kuthon is the expert on this topic. It's actually kind of cool that there's a god in Golarion who is the expert on this topic! Maybe this is why the concepts aren't considered infohazardous here? That would also be pretty neat. Merrin wasn't especially fond of having this small but important part of herself and her life that she couldn't talk about with anyone except Keepers and boyfriends. She doesn't like having to hide things. 

She...isn't totally sure how sadism and masochism are a route toward growing up and becoming strong enough to accomplish everything she wants to accomplish in Golarion without breaking anything by accident.

(If it turns out that she can grow up into the perfect adult via the Power Of Masochism then that would be hilarious and - feels like the sort of thing that would be a fiction trope - not one that Merrin herself is familiar with, in fiction she's read, but there does exist fiction in dath ilan about sadists and masochists, written by the people who know about that, for the others to read. Merrin hasn't read it, on the general principle that she doesn't want to end up exposed to all the things and then get bored, and also because she super doesn't have time for any more leisure reading. But. Fine, okay, if Zon-Kuthon is able to take her on as a metaphorical-employee then Merrin will consider that evidence toward some kind of fiction-trope-driven selection on her having ended up here at all and maybe evidence that it's a Romance and she is going to end up dating Albe and then dissolving her antimagical field by fully awakening her sexuality that is NOT ON TOPIC she is doing a metaphorical god-job-interview right now and her brain can stop that.) 

Anyway, she - thinks she is probably not a good enough fit for Zon-Kuthon to want to make her a 'cleric', but if it turns out she's wrong then - well, she would be confused and have additional questions but she wouldn't say no? 

What a curious and interesting situation, being stared at by so many gods.

Zon-Kuthon would not ordinarily look at anything so curious and interesting, these qualities being repulsive for themselves.  But He is unfortunately Lawful and sane - He could not otherwise be the greatest possible desecration of all Dou-Bral is and hoped to become - and so for instrumental reasons He will nonetheless examine this situation, to see if there is value here to be destroyed.

Well.  Isn't that fucking wonderful.

Irori was not going to ask this.  Usually Irori doesn't even try asking questions of Asmodeus, unless Irori has an informational advantage or Asmodeus is unlikely to have one, because Asmodeus is an absurdly adversarial negotiating partner.  And, in fact, Irori is not offering to pay for this information.

But now that actual fucking Zon-Kuthon has shown up to this party, would Asmodeus possibly care to explain what's going on in the heart of His power in Golarion?  By way of it being in Asmodeus's interest to cheaply refute any speculations that the other parties might have here, about some dangerous plan of Asmodeus's involving Zon-Kuthon, which other gods should perhaps expend energy to halt?

Dou-Bral fought Rovagug, Zon-Kuthon may well be only biding His own time about that, and there is an Otolmens intervention here.

...it's probably That Squirrel again.

'That Squirrel', hm?