The other thought that Esta did not suppress, because his brain needed something to chew on and seemed to want to pick something that would hurt to bite, is how probably this is all his fault for acting like a Lawful Neutral fool for weeks on end; the moment that he was put into a context strange enough that nothing was forcing him to be Asmodean or rewarding him for being Asmodean.  He probably found it pleasant, and didn't admit it, to be stranded on an alien planet and to not be getting orders every day and new emergencies every three days.  To have so little to do, and not have it be his own fault for doing so little; because what can you do after the spells run out and you can't keep searching for the lost item, after all.  He chose laziness over Evil when given half a chance, and now Asmodeus has abandoned him, and it is all his fault.

(WIS 22 is not enough to stop someone from twisting around their own past story and history in their mind, until it makes events out to be their own fault, and thereby, within their own imaginary control retrospectively.  To have things be your own fault is still to be the big important chooser of your life, and to have the series of past events be a story with a narrative and a moral...

For someone who'd grown up in dath ilan and heard a few proverbs, WIS 22 would be more than enough to enforce the internal choice not to do that.

But without any proverbs at all to hand about what dath ilan would consider real Wisdom, WIS 22 is not enough to invent all the right proverbs starting from Cheliax's baseline.)

When Mariona Merrin comes to ask of him his items, there will be about him a blankness, not an outwardly visible blankness, but delays in response out of a face that has mostly reverted to Chelish expressionlessness.  There is too little reason to do anything; punishment is coming for him, but not in a way where he has any idea of how to evade it, or which actions correspond to more or less pain.

She... wants to borrow his items... and here they are still in this mad Lawful Neutral context that has destroyed his life and also there is not a better way visible to go forward from here, because he has already lost Asmodeus's power.  He wants to change everything and he wants it to have changed in the past and he is aware, in fact, of how all the actions to change things now would not make them better.  Because you do learn quite young, in Cheliax, that desperate lashing-out after you've already earned your punishment, really will not make things better for you.

She wants to borrow his items.

What is he supposed to do with that fact?

There will be a long pause of Esta looking blank before he responds, and the deciding factor that ends up moving him will be the possibility that the Outer God's game is still continuing to some unknown end.

They have no money to pay each other.  There is nothing obvious for him to ask of her to promise by Asmodean compact, in exchange.  He could try saying 'no' and that, too, would not help anything.

But he knows something by now of the way of dath ilan.

"You'll swear to give them back, and you will owe me a favor or trust of corresponding magnitude at some future point," Esta says.  His voice a little flat.

Because in dath ilan you can just ask people to do that, and at that future point they'll just do it fairly.  He's already lost to Asmodeus, and being fucking Abadaran will not make his life visibly any worse, and it grates at him to go on doing this but he cannot think of better things to do.

???????

That was in some sense enormously less complicated than Merrin had expected and...yet...she is not feeling better about the situation at all.

Her opaque social instincts are SCREAMING at her, and it's sort of like the experience of an alarm-tone she's NEVER HEARD BEFORE and cannot even slightly decipher abruptly shrieking at her in the middle of, not even a sim, but a real actual emergency, complete with the feeling of startled affronted resentment because that is not SUPPOSED to happen she's supposed to have been TRAINED for this. 

- well, it's probably just true that she's never dealt with someone in whatever psychological state Esta is in right now and her mental alarms aren't calibrated for it. Good job, Merrin's social instincts, noticing that "being fired by their horrible torture doomgod and abandoned on a distant planet with an uncanny alternate-universe version of their coworker" is both pretty upsetting and bad for someone, and also not something that could conceivably have happened in dath ilan where she could observe it and there is no reason why Exception Handling would have made sure she was trained to respond to it appropriately.  

Merrin does not love the idea of owing Esta an unspecified future favor, of corresponding magnitude to borrowing all of his incredibly valuable and useful magic items for an entire day. What if he wants a HORRIBLE favor. 

But this is a much better outcome than the median case she was expecting. Now does not seem like a time when she can expect to get an outcome she prefers to this with more upfront negotiation. Her social instincts are yelling at her that she should not bother this man with cognitively demanding questions, right now, perhaps purely on the basis that it took him a weirdly long time to answer a question that shouldn't have required all that much thought, perhaps on the basis of some other consideration that she hasn't managed to pull out of opaque intuition and into verbal reasoning.

And...it's only going to be relevant in the worlds where they win. (Not that she's only considering herself to owe the favor if and when they get off this planet - if he comes up with a corresponding favor he wants that can be accomplished here, so be it - but in that case it wouldn't matter to anyone besides the two of them, and that's just - not very high stakes.) 

...Merrin isn't sure that she's thinking about all of this in the right way. It feels slippery and she feels small and tired and stupid. But her brain is the only one she has, here. 

Sure. Merrin will swear very seriously to return his items when she comes back - with a clarification that it's not perfectly guaranteed she will come back, but she's done this dozens of times under worse conditions - and she agrees to owe him a favor of corresponding magnitude, details to be figured out later. 

And then she'll go try to nap until it's time to leave. 

It’s instantly easier to think, again, the moment that Merrin flings herself into the tidal current and lets it carry her in an exhilarating rush down the channel and out to sea.

It's not just the headband. It's the space, the feeling like she might as well unfold everything into the Merrin it turns out she is when no one is watching. She spent four dath ilan months alone on this planet, before the recent stuff, and she still isn't alone on the planet but it's surprisingly natural to find the mindset again.

It's the imaginary voice of Kalorm whispering, You could go dance in the rain naked. Nobody can stop you, and actually the threat of sunburn was more than enough to stop her but that's never been something that tugs at her until she's confused about her own thoughts, the way that social conflict does. 

...It's not really true. She has to go back; she solemnly swore to return Esta's magic items, for one, and also her actions have consequences on people other than herself. But it still feels like a pressure-toward-insanity is suddenly gone. 

It's just Merrin, and an ocean, and no one watching her think except, maybe, an Outer God playing unfathomable games with her for unfathomable reasons, that from her own perspective come out looking laden with infuriatingly recognizable narrative tropes but who knows if that's just her projecting her own human interpretation onto something with entirely alien underlying logic. 

Merrin doesn't like it!!!

It's a bad game and she doesn't want to be playing it.

And she can't even really be tempted to refuse to play, that's not - she is predictably not a person who, when put in situations, will in very many cases refuse to take actions for weird decision-theoretic reasons - she's not sure the underlying decision-theoretic reasoning here would even be sound, the thing that's really tempting is to wish that the Outer God had picked someone else but that - 

- doesn't really land, she can't really believe in it anymore. A smaller and less capable Merrin, someone who wouldn't under the right strange pressures and tensions and application of stranger forces than those try to unfold herself to contain (exhausting) multitudes, would probably not have been a Merrin who could survive this place or save someone else.

There are other dath ilanis who could have succeeded at that task, but it would be really super weird if any of them also had alternate-universe versions who could be cornered into working for a doomworld doomgod, and that whole aspect sure seems to be a loadbearing setup for whatever game this is, and so, given that this is apparently the game, it's not really even really surprising that she's the player. She doesn't like it but she's not confused. 

A very very long way away, there are TRILLIONS OF PEOPLE IN HELL. 

(If she accepts the premise, at least. Merrin is aware that she is not in a very good position to know any things with much confidence.) 

And Merrin cannot see any avenues of action that don't involve playing along. If she stubbornly insists in mentally living inside a Reality that runs on normal physical causality, even normal physical causality that includes Esta's doomgod specialabilities as a phenomenon, there just...aren't really any plans that have any remotely conceivable chance of working. 

...That would almost be easier for Merrin to accept than the version where if she plays right, she can do something impossible and ridiculous, like making it back to Golarion and finding allies who also think the TRILLIONS OF PEOPLE IN HELL thing is a moral emergency. 

That is, to be clear, because Merrin is an INCREDIBLY STRANGE PERSON. 

(Where's the ambition in that plan?? Laeirthe would be aiming for at least one of "also setting up repeatable travel between Golarion and dath ilan" or "research project to create a god", or if not that, some even greater win that he hasn't thought of yet.) 

Yes. She's aware. But, again, her brain is the one she has to work with. 

...It's occurring to Merrin that there's no actual reason she needs to be at the surface to attempt to pray to gods. It's not like radio; presumably how deep underwater she is has no effect one way or another on how relevantly far away or hard to hear she is. 

Which means she can't stall on needing to actually try this because she also has harvest work to do, which is frustrating because it feels hard and scary

(Probably it in fact doesn't matter whether Merrin is underwater, given the vast distances and possibly entire different planes-or-whatever involved. But "Creation" does include physical laws where, for example, magic can be blocked by metals. - it doesn't hugely matter, they're going to be spending plenty of time at the surface eventually, and Laeirthe agrees that it doesn't make sense to stall until the harvest is done; either way it'll count as practice.) 

Fine, Laeirthe can go first! He thinks this is a fun exercise. 

HEY PHARASMA. GODDESS OF BIRTH AND DEATH, EXECUTIVE OF ALL THE OTHER GODS, AND AGENT WHO JUDGES SOULS FOR SOME REASON. PAY ATTENTION. 

(There is, of course, zero feedback on whether Pharasma is now paying attention. Laeirthe will forge ahead regardless.) 

So this is Merrin! 

Merrin's entire planet of origin is probably deep in the "Dark Tapestry" and may not be visible to Pharasma at all, BUT apparently there's a soul a lot like Merrin's already in Golarion. Laeirthe isn't sure if it makes it any easier for Pharasma to hear them all the way out here, but it might, and it seems of potential interest to Pharasma to know that that's a thing! It certainly looks like an Outer God is taking interest. That, too, seems like information that might be relevant to Pharasma, and a reason to look closer. 

And proceeding on the assumption that Pharasma is now looking closer: 

A Merrin is really useful toward quite a wide range of goals. Even if you ignore the capabilities of her Civilization, and just look at what's already in her. 

(Merrin is pretty short on information about what Pharasma's goals are, right now. They might as well be upfront: it's possible she wouldn't get along with Pharasma at all, depending on why exactly Pharasma is running the whole 'send trillions of souls to Hell' system. Merrin would REALLY VERY STRONGLY PREFER THAT SOULS NOT BE IN HELL and if Pharasma wants to hire her for sending-souls-to-Hell jobs, then that's not really going to work out.) 

But if Pharasma is hiring clerics for any sort of Merrin-compatible work - that involves saving lives rather than hunting down souls bound for Hell, for example - then Merrin is really pretty wildly effective at accomplishing things. She survived in an intensely hostile environment for months, alone. She adapts to bizarre new circumstances, and grows herself entire new people in her own head when her native traits aren't sufficient for the task ahead. She does stuff, relentlessly, she always has and she's not going to stop just because the world is upsetting -

it's a very strange and moderately mortifying experience to feel like she's spectating all of that happening in her own brain but Merrin is not going to argue with her imaginary fictional character about it, it's an argument he would inevitably win and what if Pharasma is paying attention and Merrin is having arguments in her brain in front of her that would be so embarrassing 

- oh! Right! HEY PHARASMA! GOD OF BIRTH APPARENTLY! THIS BIT IS GOOD! 

Merrin Merrin Merrin how much fun would it be to go solve maternal-fetal medicine on a preindustrial planet? 

Stop this is embarrassing ....oooooh!

- assuming they don't have it solved already with spells that take less than ten seconds? But if they don't then - yeah, that is a Merrin-shaped thing, sure... 

[And after a while of letting Merrin get really excited about a topic of interest] 

This might still not be a good deal for Pharasma specifically! Since apparently for some reason Merrin would need to be specifically Lawful Neutral? Oh, and admittedly also the bit where she's currently stranded on a distant exoplanet and would be a huge hassle for anyone to retrieve. 

BUT it's POSSIBLE that they were at least able to get Pharasma's attention? In which case: HEY PHARASMA! DO YOU RELAY MESSAGES TO OTHER GODS? IF MERRIN GETS SPECIALABILITIES FROM ANOTHER GOD SHE WILL ASSUME A YES ON THAT AND FIND SOME WAY TO DO A COMPARABLE FAVOR FOR YOU LATER! 

will she

that sounds hard 

(Not a real objection. Merrin does, actually, know she is capable of doing hard things, even when they're hard in the sense of being deeply confusing and not just the sense of requiring that she take physical actions for twenty-four hours straight.) 

(Merrin is very silly sometimes. That is among her traits.) 

Anyway! Perhaps Pharasma is paying attention and willing to consider informing ABADAR - Lawful Neutral god of positive-sum trade and shipping infrastructure and financial infrastructure and, in general, a number of areas where dath ilan as a Civilization excels, enough that even Esta mentioned it outright - that there are events of interest to him taking place on this distant planet, and that he should look over this way! 

Admittedly, Esta was probably also not wrong, that the deep underlying personality of a Merrin is not that Abadarish. 

But Merrin was shaped, deeply, by the Civilization that raised and taught her, and she will carry a shard of it within her forever, and - well, she's nurtured that shard, hasn't she, and here's Laeirthe, and if he were an entire person in his own right and not a model of one running on someone else's brain, then he would absolutely consider himself strongly aligned with Abadar-as-described, if perhaps not in full agreement on all priorities. 

And the existence of a place like dath ilan, and a person who holds in their mind at least many of the pieces that go into making a place like dath ilan possible, seems ALMOST CERTAINLY of great interest to Abadar, who if he's able to see them at all way out here should now be LOOKING VERY CLOSELY OKAY.

It would be an expensive upfront investment if there's anything to be done at all! Laeirthe gets that! They are really inconveniently located and he's irritated about it too. But if it's possible, if there exists a path by which Abadar giving them cleric specialabilities would give Merrin a route back to Golarion, then Laeirthe does not think that Abadar would be disappointed in the return on his investment. 

Laeirthe will now proceed to loudly think about TOPICS OF POTENTIAL INTEREST TO ABADAR for as long as Merrin continues to put up with this. 

...Longer than she normally would, because this is that important, and the headband helps (not with the math, but with the frustration tolerance for economics-related math feeling hard and tiring.)

- and Merrin does wonder if she would turn out to be a pretty Abadar-shaped person by Golarion standards. She sort of suspects there are a lot of things where her self-concept was calibrated on her position relative to most dath ilanis. They should probably come back to it later. BUT there is in fact a limit to how much Merrin is up for thinking about economics in one go. 

Erecura is next up, and...Merrin should do this one herself, she thinks? If there's a part of her that does get Erecura, it's distant from the Laeirthe-part. 

...Yes, fair. Laeirthe does not really feel like the description they were given of Erecura is one that coheres into anything, for him. (Pharasma's "domains" as described also didn't, really, but there it felt like there were other identifiers to aim for.) 

Well, for Merrin it does feel like there's - something to reach for, there. Something that feels almost familiar. 

Lawful Neutral.

Ascended mortal (????!!!!!! there are implications to mull over there, aren't there! They didn't really process that part at all, earlier– no, Laeirthe, now is still not the time to get all excited about hypothetical Hell-fixing plans that involve doing the same thing, stop that, Merrin is requesting priority on this brain right now). 

Secrets. Thriving in hostile environments. Both things of great importance to Merrin's current situation; she doesn't like that part either, especially not the secrets, but that's not really the point, is it. No one wants to be forced into a hostile environment, the question is just...what do you do, when you find yourself in one anyway. 

If you're Merrin, apparently, you immediately do agonizing quantities of math in order to, guess what, predict the future without conceptualmagic prophecy. That's a big chunk of what dath ilan Civilization is about, really, predicting the future, in ways built entirely on mortal thinkoomph. Merrin is not very good at it but she was good enough to predict the tidal bore, the first long night, the urgency of distilling water, the slightly lesser urgency of shelter and reducing power consumption, the need for food, which local biomass she would be able to sort of digest. She predicted the future correctly, every time it mattered, and so she survived and (for some definition) thrived in an environment sufficiently hostile that it would have killed a sixth-circle cleric if not for her intervention.

Merrin does? actually? think that's a moderately impressive showcase of specifically some of the things that Erecura is apparently all about?? 

And all along she's been keeping it a secret that she she semi-accidentally acquired the imaginary voice of an immortal mage from a fictional world, whose immediate proposal for - she's slightly lost track of what the problem in search of a solution was? there are a lot of problems? - was a RESEARCH PROJECT TO DESIGN AND CREATE A COOLER GOD.

Those are the really big ones, but in hindsight there are quite a lot of pieces of her thinking that she kept tucked away from Esta, starting well before she knew why specifically it was ill-advised to trust him like she would his alternate-universe dath ilani version.

Anyway. Laeirthe as a person is...probably not Erecura's vibe, really. 

But Erecura did, apparently, become a god. 

And Merrin does wonder why. 

Esta didn't see it working out, and Merrin has nowhere near enough context to make a judgement on why not and whether his reasoning is valid. Maybe there's a key piece that he didn't include, like "oh actually Erecura is super into Hell being a thing".

But maybe he just doesn't know who and what Merrin is. It was starting to seem like he must not have ever understood Mariona all that well. 

Maybe Erecura was a little bit like Merrin, once. Someone thrust unwilling into a dangerous game, with stakes far higher than her life and experience and training and native talents had prepared her for. Someone who wouldn't have chosen it for the love of winning, but who played it anyway. Someone who felt small and slow and stupid, but who did the best she could with the self she had. 

Merrin has no idea, really, what Erecura cares about. 'Secrets' and 'thriving in hostile environments' and 'predicting the future' aren't values or goals, just strategies. 

All she can offer, right now, is what she cares about. Merrin wants a future that does not include trillions of people in Hell. This seems...really hard...even if she does somehow get herself access to Golarion. 

She also, relatedly but separately, VERY BADLY WANTS for ONE SPECIFIC PERSON who is WITH HER ON THIS DISTANT PLANET to not end up in Hell. That...might or might not even be easier than the general problem, this might or might not be the kind of game where there are any shortcuts like that, but - it's easier, right now, to hold onto it in her mind and not flinch away from the scope of it. 

...It's still pretty overwhelming, to look at it directly, even when Merrin mentally shrinks down the scope of her ambitions to "save this one, specific, person." 

That's an emotional state she knows how to inhabit, is the thing. 'Become a true dath ilani protagonist and accomplish this wildly ambitious impossible goal' is abstract. Wanting Esta to be okay is the most concrete thing imaginable. It's a state she's inhabited toward arbitrary people over and over and over again. 

It feels really awful that she cannot see any way to accomplish that. Even if Erecura can hear her, and even if Erecura is generally sympathetic, Merrin is aware that getting the initial cleric-specialabilities package, and being able to create drinkable water and make herself and Esta immune to temperatures, does not, actually, do anything more than make the remaining months she can eke out until she probably dies of micronutrient deficiencies a little more physically comfortable. 

(Esta could theoretically survive indefinitely on this planet under those conditions, what with the not having to eat, but that also does not solve any of the larger problems, and...in practice Merrin doesn't really think he could pull it off without her there. The more powerful cleric specialability to create food would make it sustainable indefinitely, but that's STILL not a solution to getting off the planet, even sixth-circle cleric spells didn't provide that.) 

It does not feel...cooperative...to ask Erecura for help that would do nothing but give her more time to realize it's an unsolvable problem. 

But maybe there's a path she'll think of next week, or next month. Merrin is very small and slow and stupid, but Erecura is a god, and specifically a god of predicting the future.