...Huh. To Merrin that feels like such a specific degree of able-to-contact-his-[god], like it must have been carefully contrived to end up exactly like that? But she doesn't actually have enough context to make that judgement with any confidence.

It's better than it could have been, though! Probably. Merrin is going to go on ignoring Bored Laeirthe with his stupid reflexive contrarianism about how everything that seems good on the surface might actually secretly be terrible somehow. It's probably not completely useless, to have that backup paranoia running in her head, but it sure does get irritating after a while. 

"I've been thinking about safer alternatives to the tidal bore," she says. "It'll be annoying, but - one plan that I don't think is actually very dangerous at all, is to walk upstream the long way, and you cast your [Locate Object] while riding the river current back down. I might even be able to make a proper boat out of seaweed, with more lead time. ...Does [Locate Object] get through rock? I haven't mapped out all the caves, but that's something the spell for knowing geography might be really useful for, assuming you can tell me what you know so I can draw a map before you - do you just forget all of it after 24 hours...?" 

"Stone shouldn't block Locate Object.  Small amounts of [lead] will."  Lead is a dull, heavy metal.

"It will be my first time using [Lay of the Land].  I would expect as follows:  While I might later remember having remembered any aspect of geography that I previously took a moment to remember, I will not remember anything I haven't already remembered.  I shall of course endeavor to mentally review all of those artificial memories that seem interesting, but drawing maps seems wise if there is anything worth remembering.  At some future point, I may be able to give you that spell directly with [Imbue With Spell Ability]."

"Riding the river current back down does seem sensible, pending my successful acquisition of a [Word of Recall] to try the more dangerous version safely."

The “dull, heavy” metal is probably not uranium, which is the main very-heavy metal that the rocks around here might have unusually much of. And a “small amount” of pure metal is equivalent to a much larger amount of impure ore, if impure ore even has the same effect, it’s presumably magic rather than chemistry so who knows. Not Merrin! Merrin does not get to know very many things at all lately! 

She’s actually pretty up for a hike! She’s FED and the powerful healing magic fixed her and she’s magically immune to both heatstroke and hypothermia, and she’s full of newfound tentative hope that maybe all of her problems will be solved by planetary-evening, and those are the best conditions imaginable under which to go on a long walk on her exoplanet and actually enjoy the scenery. 

…Merrin should perhaps not be so confident that her problems would be solved by finding Estha’s magical Bag. As opposed to, you know, replaced with different and exciting new problems! 

Shut up.

Yeah, Laeirthe, cut it out and let them have some fun here. Kalorm bets that Merrin can still totally outhike Higher Stamina Estha. It’ll be hilarious.

ARGHHHH apparently the argumentative dudes in her head do NOT constitute any normal kind of psychosis, since here they are, doing their thing, after Merrin was subject to powerful healing magic, and in fact it does overall seem like it's mostly a bizarre brain hack that lets her cheat at being slightly smarter via being HARASSED into THINKING MORE THOUGHTS, and actually overall Merrin is not even disendorsing this for the current situation, it does kind of feel like having more than one perspective running in her head is helping with the general...insanitymakingness...of the whole scenario, but still, the thing is, about being harassed into thinking more thoughts via putting some of those thoughts into imaginary people or something, is that thinking more thoughts is TIRING. 

She'll ask Estha if he got more healing magic to use on himself, because she does feel a little bad about trying to outhike him if he might not be 100% recovered from his recent ordeal, but if he is then, yes, Merrin is ready to be somewhat competitive about this. 

It's about 23:30. Still only midmorning, planetary time. High tide will be in a couple of hours, and they'll want to wait until the tidal waters have receded past the stretch of river they're searching and only the little river is left, but that's still going to be well before actual low tide in 20-and-some hours - say, 15-18 hours from now as the best window. They might want to try to cover twelve miles in that time - with a stop in the middle to do his geography spell - and ideally they’d reach the furthest point early enough to give Merrin time to test making a boat, she would rather pack a bunch of dried strapwrack bundles to wet-weave-sundry over there rather than carry it in its full unwieldy form, and also she can use the walk over to finish the boat design in her head so actually making it goes really fast, it might not turn out better than the suit but it’s worth trying…

In short, Merrin is full of ideas and energy and has a fully-charged suit of armor, and is basically eager to get moving as soon as they’ve packed for a twelve-mile hike. 

Esta has more healing magic, yes.  He'll wait until he gets the [fatigued] condition, and then use it on himself.  If Merrin thinks she can still outlast him under that premise, she's welcome to try.

Twelve miles would be trivial with a road or an Extended Air Walk.  Can they do it on rough terrain?  That sounds like a more interesting challenge.

Possibly under those conditions Merrin will not outlast Estha, exactly, but she sure doesn't intend to be the one slowing them down.

(She is kind of cheating; she has power armor.) 

There are SO MANY CAVES. How are there SO MANY CAVES. They've walked, like, five kilometers, over several hours.

(The distance units that Estha's spells work on are weird and arbitrary and somewhat longer than a kilometer. The range on his geography-knowledge spell is like NINE AND A HALF kilometers. They have walked like HALF that distance and still passed so many entrances to caves and some of those cave entrances look like they go really, really deep.) 

Merrin can get quite a lot of entertainment out of looking at rocks, for a dath ilani, but she does, eventually, get bored, and want to make conversation to pass the time. 

"...So what would you say is the single spell that makes the biggest difference in your day to day life, to be able to cast?"

Merrin has almost no mental image of what kind of day to day routine Estha remembers having with...her, the other her that he remembers and she doesn't remember being...and it's kind of bothering her. 

Esta is restricted in his choice of conversation branches by not quite wanting to give away what he and Mariona used to do for a living.

The fact is, most cleric spells are not really what you'd call personal convenience spells.  It is self-obsessed wizards who are free to invent the likes of Age Resistance.  Cleric spells are god-made to be actually important: combat spells, buffs, military infrastructure like Scry, civilizational infrastructure like Create Water or Stone Shape.

The spell that Esta has the most personal fun with, when he is relaxing in some young lady's unconsenting company, is the spell Bestow Curse.  You can do so many things if you invest some time and effort and Spellcraft in realizing the full flexibility of Bestow Curse.  (It's not even wasted effort for someday ruling the Church.  Rugatonn's supreme expertise in curses, used for the likes of 'cursing Chelish workers abroad to be unable to act to escape Cheliax', is arguably more valuable to the Chelish state than her ninth-circle spells.)  Esta thinks he maybe shouldn't mention that part either.

On Mariona's literal words as to what spell merely being able to cast brings forth the greatest change in day to day life, there is a single very obvious answer:  The defining spell of 4th-circle: the spell whose willing casting gets you told the real truths about the Church*, promoted to the true inner ring** and all the wealth and power that brings for everyday life: that spell whose unforced casting is considered nearly as good as a wizard's soul-sale, in terms of making its caster to know theirself for damned in a way that is nearly impossible to ever atone for, and with correspondingly assured loyalties: Malediction.

(*)   Esta does not know the real truths about the Church.
(**)  The actual lnner Ring is "Rugatonn, Gorthoklek, and Lrilatha", but 4th circles and above believe themselves to be in it.

"I suppose [Word of Recall]," Esta replies.  "It reduces the number of overnight missions, and gets you sent out on other missions where you can save a 7th-circle spell on the [Greater Teleport] going back.  So there's a marked difference in how you spend your days, afterward."

"Though I might just be thinking of that one because it's my own most recent change.  Other clerics might name the [Guidance] cantrip, which is a little boost to any skill that requires quick decisions, but that trades off against other important cantrips like [Detect Magic] or [Resistance]."

That would affect quite a lot of logistics, wouldn't it. Though, like, mostly from the perspective of a civilization that doesn't have airplanes. Merrin - for lack of a more specific picture of what the version of her that Estha remembers actually did with her time - is trying to picture how the spells described would affect her Exception Handling missions. The [Word of Recall] would be useful for extraction - ohhhh, it would have made a big difference in the whole Kalorm rescue, wouldn't it, assuming it would let you bring other people along...?

That's kind of epic to imagine, actually. Presumably the version of her that Estha remembers did not get to have that spell yet, because she wasn't as talented or experienced, but it would be SUPER COOL to be able to dive into the ocean to rescue someone and then TELEPORT THEM DIRECTLY to the hospital in Default. 

...Which, of course, makes her wonder about the magic that's most sparkly to her.  

"What are the best healing spells? Did I," did the version of her he remembers, she means, but she's sort of implicitly testing if it seems to reassure Estha if she speaks of it like she might be that person and not a completely different Merrin who just shares his Merrin's face and some traits, "have a favorite?" 

"Your favorite healing spell was the least powerful one, so weak that it is in fact a cantrip and thus has unlimited uses:  [Stabilize].  It repairs the bare minimum required to prevent a dying person from continuing to lose vitality."

"From your perspective, it was an enabling spell for using nonmagical medicine once you had run out of magical healing -- which happened to you sometimes, though perhaps not as often as you would have secretly enjoyed, if you could have wished for such a thing without thereby wishing harm on your subordinates.  [Stabilize] gave you time to triage your patients and perform surgery on them before they died, and also prevented them from dying of the surgery.  You insisted on preparing that spell every day without fail, even on days where it seemed very unlikely to be required.  Unless you'd received direct contrary orders for one day, and then you pouted."

As for whether Merrin can infer that she is Mariona's fantasy, and not even her own fantasy, it may be early to wish for her to see it.

The other her got to have an UNLIMITED-USE MAKE PEOPLE NOT DIE spell??????!!!!!!!! 

...Okay, Merrin is in fact officially jealous now. 

(And slightly weirded out by the comment about 'perhaps not as often as you would have secretly enjoyed', but the Estha she remembers also liked to tease her about secretly loving emergencies and wishing they would happen all the time. She doesn't think it's true, because actually emergencies are really stressful at the time and mostly fun to think about afterward when it went well and sometimes it does not go well and then instead she feels terrible! But, like, there's a kernel of truth to it, it's pretty fair to tease her about it.) 

They run into some more difficult terrain again and Merrin spends a couple of minutes mostly focused on navigating that. (She isn't even slightly tired, yet, though at this rate she is eventually going to get hungry again even with the absurd quantity of food she ate earlier.) 

Eventually she manages to track down the bit that was actually niggling at her. “- Huh, what were the circumstances where it made sense for me to be given direct orders not to prepare [Stabilize]?”

"When you needed other cantrips instead, of course.  I mind that time the obvious best loadout for your mission was [Detect Poison], [Mending], [Create Water], and [Read Magic], and you tried to arrange for your subordinates to carry a hundred gallons of water along with you so that you could have [Stabilize] in place of [Create Water].  I couldn't quite come with, on that excursion, but I could do the nearly equally valuable service of ordering you not to prepare [Stabilize] that morning."

Oh nooooooo that’s so mortifying. That’s exactly the kind of thing Merrin would— okay, that a younger Merrin with less experience at navigating her own silly moments of neuroticism would do, if she were under too much cognitive load to properly take a step back and question whether her high-level decisionmaking and prioritization was completely insane.

…On reflection, though, while she’s taking Estha’s word for it that it was correct to prioritize [Create Water] over [Stabilize] - he’s smarter than her and more experienced, and if he’d been wrong then she would have argued back with logic, not conceded that she was letting her neuroticism steer - it does leave her with some questions about exactly what circumstances entailed those constraints.

“What was the mission?” she says, with a slightly abashed smile.

"Mm.  I have been somewhat deliberately avoiding telling you all the details about -- my Merrin -- for two reasons.  A smaller reason is that we are already trying the [curse-countering methodology] of my hearing freely about that {dath ilan} which should, on your view, be Estha's native world and my own true memory.  To do otherwise in the reverse direction, reserves the option of, say, seeing if you begin to remember things naturally, or later trying to tell you many key facts at once."

"A larger reason is that I do suspect your memories of having undergone the greater alterations and deletions, at the hands of an [Outer God].  It has been seen to carefully arrange events here to be resistant to our own undoing of them.  One should be cautious, in attempting to challenge and undo the works of [divinity].  One should perhaps still challenge, in the end, when the [god] is not an allied one.  But one should be deliberate and measured about doing so.  If I don't try early on in the [Outer God]'s game to restore your memories -- for example, by giving you back what should be your true native language, rather than [Utopian] -- then perhaps we will not encounter early resistance.  You may be intended to remember for yourself."

SUSPICION ALERT he's concealing information from her with a justification that MIGHT be honest but also MIGHT NOT!

....Yes. Merrin had in fact not failed to notice that. 

Has Laeirthe noticed that they're also doing some information-concealing, here? In particular, of the fact that Merrin has acquired a bizarrely agentic mental simulation of a paranoid immortal mage from a FICTIONAL SETTING even if this is apparently not strictly speaking insanity since the [Heal] spell did not get rid of him. 

Yep! And Laeirthe would like to continue concealing his existence, please. It's one of the few genuinely-maybe-secret advantages Merrin still has, if it turns out that Altered Estha or Other World Estha or whatever he is can't be trusted for some reason, and also has pretty good predictions of Merrin overall because the other one, or the original, or whatever the underlying Reality is here, apparently still has recognizably similar personality traits, based on Merrin's reaction to descriptions so far.