If there's a future where Merrin ever gets off this planet 

and she guessed right, that perhaps Erecura once had a little bit in common with her, and is perhaps a little bit sympathetic to what Merrin cares about, here 

then, yes, Merrin IS asking for help, and she's not going to let the fact that she feels really embarrassed about that stop her, because she's trying to be a dath ilani protagonist now

...Aaaaand it's been...hours, somehow? and Merrin has now filled all of her auxiliary bags with snails (because she's a bit worried that the snails will just suffocate if she puts them into an extradimensional space for the next twenty hours), and stuffed a whole lot of tubers that she knows she can process into food and a whole lot of strapwrack for building material and samples of all the many plants she never had room to take back with her before, into the Bag of Holding. It should still have capacity for at least most of the snails, later, so she can streamline herself more for the difficult swim back. 

Well. None of that did anything so far. Maybe prayer is just blocked by water

...Merrin should cycle through all of those gods again, of course, probably multiple times, thinking about it in different ways. She'll do that. She has TWENTY HOURS before it'll be time to swim back in. 

For now, though, it's possible that what she actually needs to do is just. Cry. Here, where no one can see her and it's not making anything weird. About the horrifying awfulness of a gigantic screaming moral emergency a long, long way away, that does not matter the slightest bit less by Merrin's values for being distant, or for being something she has only a slender thread of a hope of ever having a plan to fix even a little bit. 

Maybe she needs to cry about it for a pretty long time, actually. 

...did Merrin really just manage to lose ALMOST SEVEN HOURS into the pit of Crying About Hell Being Really Upsetting? How? Truly, wearing a magic Belt for endurance is letting her explore new vistas of stamina. 

We-elllll, if Merrin is finally done with that.... 

....They know really very few things about Nethys, even Nethys' alignment. BUT one of the things they do know, is that when Merrin attempted to convey some of her theorizing about alternate-universe-fanfiction versions of the same people across worlds, for SOME REASON Esta's response included a Nethys mention. Which is intriguing. Also the mention that the church of Asmodeus tries to avoid conflicts with the church of Nethys, which implies that there could be a reason for conflict, for example because Nethys is not such a fan of this whole Hell thing. 

Worth a try. 

HEY NETHYS

NETHYS NETHYS NETHYS

THERE IS A VERY INTERESTING STORY HAPPENING ON THIS PLANET RIGHT NOW 

Ow. How does Laeirthe even do that with Merrin's brain!!!! It kind of hurts!!!!!

Well, he's done now. That was the entirety of the content for the Nethys Pitch. 

- oh, right, weren't they also thinking of trying some prayer at those hypothetical gods that Esta would have avoided mentioning because they really don't get along with Asmodeus? They can mix it up a bit! Give Merrin more of a break before the next round of Economics Math to try to get Abadar's attention! 

mrrghhhhOKAYFINE

Come on, doesn't this deserve some real excitement? Wouldn't it be really awesome if there were a god of precisely the things that Merrin cares about most? 

...Laeirthe's ideal god, if such a hypothetical god were to exist, would be the god of Mortals Becoming Gods In Order To Solve The Most Important Problems. Because that would be EPIC. 

But Laeirthe is only an imaginary person sharing this brain, and does not speak for all of said brain.

What would Merrin's ideal god be like? 

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Merrin's ideal god, if they exist, if they could hypothetically hear her where she is now, would be the god of - 

- so what do you do, exactly, when you find yourself in a Reality where something is deeply and horrifyingly wrong? 

What do you do, when you find out that in this game, incredibly powerful agents are trying to make things WORSE on PURPOSE, and have managed to recruit allies who are, like, basically normal humans, except they've been convinced that being Evil on purpose is the sparkly-best way to live? 

What do you do, when you've just learned that trillions of people are being TORTURED FOREVER at the behest of a horrible doomgod, and people nonetheless WORK FOR THE HORRIFYING DOOMGOD SORT OF WILLINGLY, and one of those people is (an alternate-universe version of) you? 

What do you do, when you remember a planet with a Civilization that was sane, that made sense, and you're not actually sure if that Civilization ""really"" ""exists"" but that doesn't, actually, change the part where you remember it, where it holds together, where there's an inexorable logic that of course you try to build something better? What do you do, when you carry a shard of that Civilization inside you, but you are very small and stupid, and trapped in a game with stakes far beyond anything you were ever trained for? 

What do you do, when you're an Exception Handling medtech who knows how to put all of yourself and all of your caring and wanting and trying - and you can bring to bear quite a lot of caring and wanting and trying - toward saving one person at a time, and you don't even know, yet, if you can do it with the one most obvious person whose life you have the power to affect, but if you - if you could, if you could take that one, that first, step, toward making this stupid Reality better rather than worse - 

- you wouldn't stop there. 

Merrin's ideal god - 

(IF THEY EXIST, IF THEY CAN SEE HER ALL THE WAY OUT HERE) 

- is the god of believing that one can know what it means for things to be better rather than worse.

That one can reason in ways that bend toward truth.

That one can achieve better outcomes by trying harder. 

That one can, and also should, try to be capable of more, if the problems are not yet fixed. 

oh no 

the actual Merrin is clearly nowhere near cool enough for the ideal god she just made up in her head

maybe Ideal Merrin would be but she's not Ideal Merrin

she only has Emotional Maturity Level 4000 

LAEIRTHE WHY IS SHE LIKE THIS 

LOOK HE DOESN'T KNOW EITHER 

(Ow? Can the imaginary people in her head maybe not shout?) 

- trying that again, this time without the being silly. 

It's bad for trillions of people to be tortured forever! That's not even complicated or fancy as moral reasoning goes! 

It doesn't change whether it's bad, that some of them have sent other people to Hell on purpose. That's also not complicated.

The entirety of dath ilan's Civilization would stand behind that conclusion, and they're not here, right now, but Merrin is, and Merrin is declaring now that she DOES NOT ACTUALLY CARE whether the Civilization she remembers is a place that really exists. She can still know which world-states are better than others, especially when it's not actually complicated, and she's not that smart but she's still capable of modeling how Reality works and coming up with plans that are more rather than less likely to work, and as long as a Merrin still exists at all, to care about people's wellbeing and want better outcomes and try to achieve them, she will. not. stop. and she will build what she can of the Civilization she remembers, as long as she's able to take actions at all. 

And if there's a god listening - if there's anything listening, out there - then, yes, she could use some help. 

She's crying again. It takes a while to notice. 

That's fine? It's not currently interfering with any of their goals. It might even help, if there in fact exists a god out there who thinks that the Hell situation is HORRIFYING and UPSETTING. 

...she should probably be drinking a lot more from her electrolyte-meal-replacement-filled drinking pouch, though. 

Yeah. 

She floats in a vast ocean, purple with algae that are slowly filling a planetary atmosphere with oxygen.

Give it another half a billion years, and this planet might have intelligent life on it.

Not that Merrin will be around to see it, one way or another. 

But she's glad she was here, for a brief moment in geological time. It's a neat planet.

She's glad of everything she had time to build.

She's glad of how those six planetary months alone made her stronger, and maybe it won't count for anything, it depends more or less entirely on the unfathomable whims of an Outer God's game, but - she thinks that if, somehow, her Estha from dath ilan could see what she's done, here, then he wouldn't be too disappointed in her. 

She imagines her thoughts as a radio, calling out into the vastness of interstellar space, and distances greater and stranger than that, whatever sort of distance it is that separates different alternate-universe-fanfiction depictions of the same people, because for SOME REASON THAT SEEMS TO BE A THING, and she imagines that maybe, somewhere, out there, someone or something is listening, and maybe she still has the chance to do something, with her body and mind and choices, that matters, to someone other than herself.