"I like surprises if they are well-executed."

"I can generally execute projects such as military campaigns rather well, I think, so I will have to see if that transfers to dates."

He walks her to Aroden's rooms, making conversation by asking her what Corentyn was like. 

Aroden greets her warmly, and not with much formality. "Welcome back! Delightful to see you again. He ushers her in. "Parmida you met before. This is my daughter Zahra." 

Corentyn's a big port city. It was badly damaged during the civil war a century ago and all national investment in fixing it has been focused on the fortresses, and on the port, so the city's downtown is still badly damaged and there aren't big nice public works to speak of like in Egorian. But it was a pretty safe place in another way, you weren't terribly likely to come to anyone's attention and the schools were good and people from all over the world would pass through the Arch of Triumph - the Arch of Aroden, she corrects herself nervously, it was returned a month ago to the name the rest of the world knows it by and the name it had in Cheliax a long time ago.

"Your majesty," she says, and nods to Parmida and Zahra. "It's good to see you again. I hope everything's been going smoothly."

(Leareth doesn't seem bothered at all by her referring to the Arch of Aroden by its name under Asmodeus; internally he's a tiny bit bothered, but not at all because he thinks she misspoke, just because it's a reminder of the century during which Aroden had lost.) 

"Yes, thank you. There remains a great deal of work to be done but it is mostly proceeding according to plan."

He hopes Parmida can tell if Carissa is still nervous, because he can't. 

Carissa seems much less nervous! Even in infernal Cheliax people who could kill you any time they wanted don't usually invite you to dinner parties to do it.

Leareth pulls out a chair for her at the dinner table; he's seen Parmida do it for Aroden.

He feels like he has no idea what to do, here, and it's not even just a matter of being unsure how romance works; if he were just trying to make friends with her he'd be out of his depth too. 

Aroden asks Leareth how he's been finding Abadar's new human-friendly interface; he tries to pause every so often and glance at Carissa so she feels invited to participate. 

Leareth isn't sure how to discuss it without getting very technical about the details of his god-plan that he transferred over to Abadar, but if Carissa seems interested he can break it down into small pieces and do his best to explain. 

She probably doesn't have all the context to follow along but it seems important to him so she'll try. It's wildly impressive. She isn't even sure where she'd start on a project to make it easier for a god to have a human-friendly aspect.

Parmida, should we change the subject to something else that she can participate in better, Aroden asks his wife after a while. 

Well, I can't make head nor tail of it but she seems to be doing a little better than that? At some point you should ask her something about the kind of magic she does but I don't think you have to hurry off this topic necessarily.

Then once they've reached a more graceful pivot point in the conversation, Aroden segues it over to asking Carissa about her own magical background, and whether there were any particularly interesting puzzles involved in making her sword-hatpins. 

Oh that's a good idea, why didn't he think of that. Leareth is also genuinely curious to know, and still getting up to speed on the intricacies of arcane magic enough that it's a bit of a challenge for him to follow two wizards talking about their magic. 

She didn't do anything that wasn't a variant on something she saw at the Worldwound; she was there for three years and saw a lot of bizarre arrangements high level adventurers or foreign armies made. That's how she learned that it was possible to make a magic item for a spell that wasn't even a spell wizards could stabilize (like Glibness), and where she learned how to get things to not interfere with each other, and then there wasn't actually much innovation involved in the hat pins besides knowing what materials would have the requisite reserves at a size that small. Then when she learned from Jisa that Velgarth mages could see 'life force' she was at loose ends for a little while, trying to think how to project the right amount of something she couldn't see, until she remembered that the size of gem required for Soul Bind and the material components required for Scribe's Binding varied with something called life force, maybe the same thing, and obviously she couldn't cast either of those but she could go look up how it was done - infernal Cheliax made the details of Soul Bind a secret for obvious reasons but she was in the military and there were some permitted uses - 

- Aroden, who presumably has both of those spells, might know a much easier way than the one she jury-rigged -

That's very impressive and clever, especially for someone who doesn't have Aroden's godmemory intuitions for how spells are put together. Aroden just invented a "Detect life-force" spell, from a god's perspective it's closely related to all the various other things one can detect about a person, like Detect Aura. He's never actually used Scribe's Binding but he invested in having it as an option. 

Inventing spells is not just difficult but a lot riskier for most people, though. Aroden has invented hundreds and never had one explode on him, though sometimes they don't do what he was hoping for. Nefreti does it his way, which is partly because he taught her for the first couple years of her magical education, and partly because she's...Nefreti. And her spells do explode with some frequency. 

Carissa has never invented a spell, for precisely that reason where they explode, she just learns them off everyone who showed up and would talk to her, and in this case she just modified her shield spell to let through the percentage of life energies she calculated ought to be approximately correct. If she'd had one then she could have checked and known Batty was safe and not attended the dinner party and - well, objectively that would probably be a worse situation, but still.

Leareth definitely thinks that would be a worse situation; probably Carissa would have gotten caught eventually, but it could have happened under circumstances much less conducive to her liking him at all. 

"Unfortunately I probably cannot teach you how to invent spells my way, it does not transfer well, but I am of course happy to teach you any spell you would like to have, and if you curious if a particular spell even exists, I can likely find out or invent it for you." 

Carissa looks like someone has just offered her the most ridiculous bribe in the entire universe.

Leareth gets that. Having a chance to work closely with Aroden is an excellent bribe in a number of ways.

"I am curious how it works to make a magic item for a spell you cannot yourself cast? I suppose this is doable for our magic, but mainly in cases where the spell on a talisman or focus is too complex for a human to cast by themselves at all." 

"Glibness is a Bard spell. Bards are spontaneous casters - more like you than like me, right, if they know how to do something and have the energy for it they can do it at any time. Glibness doesn't stabilize and so I can't prepare it myself. I can weave the pattern right onto the artifact, it's just much trickier than doing it for a spell I can stabilize."

"Fascinating! It might be more similar to the way Velgarth mages always make artifacts, then, since our spells do not stabilize in the same way." 

"How do Velgarth mages make artifacts -"