If Merrin were in a normal mental state, she might feel embarrassed, as she rides the tide back up the river channel.

There's no indication that any of that effort did anything whatsoever. She hasn't managed to come up with any other ideas. She may have spent LITERALLY HALF of her time out there crying. She has, maybe, come around to having a bit of empathy for Esta's initial reaction being anger, that she thinks she can walk into his life and fix something that he does, in fact, have some solid reasons to believe is impossible to change. 

Physically, she's a lot less tired than she has any right to be, thanks to the Belt being literally magic. Mentally, she...has never, actually, ever before had any way - or any reason - to push her brain so hard for so long. Maybe no one has! Maybe whatever mental state she's in right now is literally unprecedented in the history of dath ilan! That would be kind of amusing.

Anyway. Whatever Merrin's brain is doing right now cannot really be described as ""thinking"", and her current relationship to the standard suite of human emotions is a tenuous one. Merrin is on the other side of embarrassment, and on the other side of basically every single social inhibition, and they have no power left to move her.

She is currently just barely running enough metacognition to be, like, self-aware that this is a thing happening to her, and that she should probably not have any high-stakes conversations in this state even if it would be really, really funny, and the boring normal Merrin who has social inhibitions isn't here to stop her 

Fortunately for normal boring Merrin who has social inhibitions, current Merrin is not sure she's capable of having a conversation. Her thoughts have mostly stopped bothering to happen in verbal form, and she really doubts she could manage the cognitive overhead of speaking a foreign language without magical assistance. 

merrinshoulddothingsthatachievehergoalsandnotthingsthatdon'tdothat

(aaaaaaand Laeirthe is out, this brain is not working for him right now) 

It takes her over an hour to unpack the really very full Bag of Holding into her food storage antechamber in a vaguely reasonable manner that tomorrow-Merrin will not be deeply resentful about, rather than, like, dumping everything including the plant matter directly into the snailpond. Future Merrin is already going to have plenty of grounds to be annoyed at how much biomass-processing she'll need to do to turn all of this into edible calories before it rots. Maybe she'll get the food-preservation cleric specialability from someone who heard her after all but that is really not to be counted upon. 

Almost thirty hours after she left it, Merrin drags herself back into the main cave area. 

She is somewhat tunnel-visioned on her eight-step plan: 1. find Esta, 2. hand over the Bag of Holding, 3. remove armor, 4. plug armor into main battery to charge, 5. remove Belt and headband, 6. hand those back too, 7. stagger off into her work area, 8. fall asleep on the floor. If there turn out to be any complications standing in the way of accomplishing any of those steps, the resulting Merrin-behaviors are undefined and not at all guaranteed to be sensible. 

He might at some point make a facial expression about the part where she has (3) removed armor but still not handed over the Belt and headband.

Cheliax doesn't really have a concept of subordinates being in a state where additional demands shouldn't be placed on them by superiors.  Esta personally has independently formulated and invented this concept, but.  Like.  Not that much of it.

Is a facial expression all he’s doing about it? Then, uh, Merrin will literally not notice until she’s done plugging in the armor and headed in his direction anyway. 

(This plan was workshopped a couple of hours earlier by a slightly less utterly fried Merrin, who worried that the moment the headband was off her head, she would crash hard, lose what little was left of her situational awareness, and literally forget about the armor’s existence because she now had the attention span and object permanence of a six-month-old infant, and then the armor would NOT BE CHARGED when she woke up and that would be pretty annoying if there ended up being any kind of emergency that required using it.) 

In any case, she's going to spend almost an entire minute with 100% of her attention on setting the armor upright against the wall, NOT knocking it over by being clumsy and careless - because she absolutely doesn't have the frustration tolerance to deal with that and she might literally cry - and then on plugging in the cable despite the fact that her fine motor skills are pretty shot at this point. 

She'll notice the facial expression a bit once she turns around, but at that point she is so, so close to the goal of being horizontal, and nothing short of Esta getting up and physically grabbing her is going to count as an obstacle. 

Merrin has a fleeting urge to also hug him, but that was not one of the remaining two (2) steps on her list. She manages to dredge up what she thinks are the Taldane words for "thank you", suppresses a giggle at the brief thought that what if they aren't the right words and she just said gibberish to him instead, and then turns and walks to the room and lies down on the floor. 

(Merrin is not, perhaps, making “good” decisions at the present time. She doesn’t normally sleep on stone floors; there is a bed, in the common area, even if it hasn’t seen a lot of use since Merrin was mostly replacing sleep with powerful magical healing and Esta only needs two hours per 24-hour day regardless. She just…didn’t feel up for navigating a social interaction over it, or being physically in the same space as Esta at all. Waking up incredibly sore is a tomorrow!Merrin problem, as is the part where she’s running a significant calorie deficit and her eight-item plan did not include eating any food.)

She’ll be asleep much more quickly than usual.

(Not especially lucidly.)

(Some dath ilanis get really into lucid dreaming, for various reasons. Merrin could have done it! It's a type of practice that benefits more from conscientiousness than raw thinkoomph! She never really saw the point, though. She uses her cognitive abilities hard when she's awake, she doesn't want to do more deliberate practice or whatever when she's asleep, and honestly she likes the weird vivid dream-plots her brain comes up with when left to its own devices.) 

Ooh, space! Pretty! Can she zoom around? 

Is that...thing...friendly? Oh! It's talking to her!

Can she pet it? It looks soft...

The dream will continue.

Oh, it's cute! 

"I want a hug," Merrin says. Apparently talking in space works? - the confusion's already fled, forgotten by her tired, dreaming mind. "Do you do hugs?"

"- that's not really the thing, though, I want - I miss Estha - I want -" 

No one could possibly argue with that being a reasonable thing to want. Only, she can't remember why she doesn't get to just. Get on a plane. And hug her boyfriend? 

Ohhhhh right. Wrong planet. 

That's dumb :(((( 

"Oh, I forgot. There's more backstory, isn't there." 

(Merrin's dreams often unfold a spectacular amount of weird backstory mid-stream. She's not in the habit of questioning it, even when her metacognition isn't worn to shreds.) 

"I was gonna have to be an epic protagonist. - that's not because I want to, though, it's because..."

“- I gotta fix it for the other me. I want - I want her to get the nice boyfriend version, right, only, I think she probably doesn’t want to share mine? There’s all the cultural differences, it’d be weird. She’d want hers, just, not Evil anymore?” 

Merrin nods to herself, satisfied with her dream-logic reasoning.

“Yeah. So I have to fix the doomgod doomcountry problem, right, because I want her to have a different career that isn’t horrible, and I want to be able to say, here, I rescued your Esta for you, and I fixed him too. I think that’d be good? But it only works if she’s allowed to not be Evil anymore too.”

She mulls on that for a moment. (Merrin’s metacognition, such as it is, is entirely running on dream-logic right now, but it is running.)

“…And then I want a hug. From my Estha. After I tell him. He’d think it was really cool, right?” 

The dream continues.

More plot! Wow! 

(Look, Merrin is really, really tired, and in particular is suffering the effects of having pushed her brain as far as it would let her with a powerful cognition-enhancing headband. Also, she's asleep, and dreaming. Her metacognition is down.) 

"I'm sorry," she says, "I don't remember if I'm supposed to know you. ...Are you friends with Laeirthe, by any chance? He's a catboy too. But not so - well, dark and ominous, you're so doompunk."

Merrin right now cannot remember why any of that even came to mind, though, and a moment later it's gone. Anyway!

"Hiii, Nyaaaarlathotep!" He doesn't really look that huggy. Sad. "Are your friends coming too? Uh, Yog-Sothoth or Azazoth or Shub, ummm, Shub-Niggurath, or - Yibtistill? I think I mangled that? or Hastur? ....Do any of them do hugs?" 

She can't actually remember, in this moment, why she's on such a mission for hugs specifically, there's just a vague background sense that she's had no prospects for hugs for a long time and foresees none anytime soon and she's really, really lonely.

So it's nice that people keep showing up to talk to her! Even if they're strange! 

"Many things that exist, and many things that do not, will provide hugs when beseeched in the correct fashion.  Shub-Niggurath is also called, 'The Elder Sister-Like One'."

"But you have not called upon Her in that way.  And Azathoth sleeps, and Hastur's name has only been spoken once, and Yibb-Tstill has stayed forever upon the moment of stepping upon a magic carpet."

"As for Yog-Sothoth, It is both the Gate, and the Key and Guardian of the Gate.  But so vast is the evil and corruption of the Outer Gods that they take no notice of this conflict of interest."

That was confusing! Merrin does not think she entirely followed it!

Merrin would normally at least dislike that, but she sure seems to have temporarily burned out her ability to experience negative emotions for anything smaller-scale than the - thing - the thing she has to fix - 

"Oh," she says. "Well, if I'd have to beseech someone, I don't think I want a hug from a stranger that badly, that's not - the thing, uh -"

Wait, wasn't she just telling someone else about...? 

"What I really want," she says, cheerfully, "is to rescue Mariona," because it's just floated back into her narrow current awareness that there's a name attached to her alternate-universe self, "and fix the whole thing with the doomworld doomgod and the torture afterlife? - and get her back her boyfriend, she's probably worried, but it's very important that he stops being Evil first, otherwise I don't think it'd be a nice thing for her at all. And then I want a hug, from my version."  

Is that complicated? Merrin feels like she maybe remembers someone saying so but surely those are just. Normal, reasonable things to want, that should be possible to achieve. 

....There was a thing, wasn't there. A thing she missed, and now the narrowed laser of Merrin's awareness is falling on it directly. 

"Waaaaait," Merrin says. "I've heard of Outer Gods. ...Nyaaaarlathotep, did one of your friends kidnap Esta and set up the game?" The backstory is once more unfolding midstream. Wow there's a lot of backstory plot. "Because I normally try not to get in the way, if someone is having fun, but - it's a bad game and it's not fun and I don't like it." 

Pause.

"And I have to play it anyway and I can't even wish it wasn't me or pretend I'm not cool enough."

All of that comes easily to mind, in the way of thoughts she very recently went over repeatedly with enough thoroughness that the pattern lingers in her thoughts. Though if there were feelings associated with the thoughts, before, they're not present now. 

"Maybe you know the rules," Merrin says absently. 

"The rules say you ought to be going insane right now, so I'd suggest continuing to ignore them."

"It is, however, a problem even for the Outer Gods -- for our entire universe, in fact -- if you should refuse the game.  It is not ordinarily something that any element of our universe would have the capacity to do.  I cannot defy the imagination of Azathoth, Who imagines Me.  I am more helpless before It than the meanest insect, because I am nothing but Its thought.  But you, Merrin -- you are the shadow of a stranger structural relationship between what does exist and what does not.  That Lairthe, who by right of mental simulation ought to obey your every command, is instead able to defy you, is a shadow of that structure whose shadow you are."

"You do not have power to shape the game.  But you might refuse it.  Your simple dislike of it is enough to slow Time almost to a hiatus, as perceived from right angles to reality, though of course you cannot see that from your own perspective."

"My principals would prefer that you undo your dislike of Our game.  Elsewise it threatens the very completion of this universe.  But to negotiate with you is a feat that is fundamentally beyond Them, and also beyond Me.  We can only perform actions if they have not been coordinated with anyone."