He appropriates Carissa's material component pouch for a) the pouch itself b) a little candle, to serve as foci, and casts.

A perfectly neutral dire rat stands in the apartment.

He picks up the dire rat and examines it critically. "Well, this here might be your problem, Asmodia." He sets the rat down on the floor.

"- ah," says Asmodia. "I think I've been comporting myself Lawfully enough but I probably haven't done anything Evil and it's possible Law wants longer to accumulate."

"Oh." She feels a sudden surge of hope. She hadn't realized that she'd been starting to entirely believe Asmodia was right and the gods couldn't reach them here. "I did aim at Lawful Evil for both of you but maybe you can't start with something that's based on life history. - you could take a boat out and make someone directly into the sea. I assume it'll count for Evil even if it's someone with no free will because Pharasma counts fetuses. It's kind of stupid and wasteful but -"

"It's illegal," says Asmodia, frowning. "I suppose it won't be the first illegal thing we've done here. They'll float, though."

"I'll come along, summon a dolphin," suggests Daron. "It can drag them down. One smallish person with no free will and we should be good. Well, evil."

"I dunno if the magic allows you to make a baby at the age where they die if they're born that early, six months along or so, but if it does, they might not even recognize it as a body if they run across it, because babies are really rare and I bet they do babies once they're at the cute chubby age anyway, not newborns."

"Also how would they feed a newborn?" wonders Daron. "All right, I'm ready, are you ready, Asmodia -"

"Yes," she says, and out they go, not particularly inviting Carissa along.

It would be stupid for her to go with them; she's solidly Evil already and for any given crime they want as few of them implicated as possible. 

She starts copying her spells into a second spellbook for Daron. He seems to know some spells without needing a spellbook at all but he'll want everything she's got as well.

They get back a few hours later. "Ah, good, you're on top of that," Daron says to Carissa, "thanks - I might have the others in your top four but I'm not leveled up enough to cast them yet, we'll have to wait and see. We should get an actual house, if we're going to be on Ivory more than another month, I spotted an ad and did the math for it."

"I can cast Clairvoyance if you know it well enough to write a spellbook entry for it, then we'll know whether Scry will also work once I level."

"I think I can write it out, yes." He takes up ink and writes. "We're going to want a whole school of wizards, even if you can only get a handful of spells with each."

"A handful of spells with each is actually incredible, if they can be any spell of any level I've even heard of. ...and probably eventually we should try ones I haven't heard of but that ought to exist, or cleric ones that no one's figured out how to emulate with arcane magic. And if we can scry Cheliax, we can talk through a scry with people there, get them to list off more spells I haven't heard of. You skipped, like, three years of wizard school, maybe four, and it's probably possible to make people smarter than you, if we figure out how to make people who are good at making people..."

"There's civilizations with a higher state of the art on it than Ivory," says Daron. "They call them 'prolerounds'. Much much stricter rule of law and they don't love immigrants, but we could get books from them, maybe borrow a prole to consult - proles might be as close as you can get to no free will without Asmodeus available to puppet people like your first try, they're very, mm, tightly made to ensure that they can make their successors with no loss of quality and they're shaped to love their assigned work. Ivory isn't there but might be trending that way."

"It seems like a very sensible way to do things if inconvenient for our goals. Could you make someone who knows what they know about making people just off the background knowledge you've got or would we need the books."

"I could try to do it but I couldn't verify I'd done it."

"Makes sense. How about uninhabited rounds, are there any of those near here?"

"Not very. Thing with rounds is they move. It's not fast, but within somebody's lifetime a few rounds will go from two day's sailing to two months, and others will get closer. And they can tell which ones are coming closer, and they preferentially colonize those; and the ones that get farther away are often colonized before they're out of range. We can try for one far enough away that they haven't bothered yet, that you need a telescope to see, but we'll be competing for that with the special-purpose ship crews that turn up with starting supplies and plans for a hundred colonists, and it's always possible it'll arrive already colonized from the other direction."

"How about places we could conquer, are there any of those?"

"Yeah, could do, at least before they get going on making their own wizards. Probably gets all the other neighbors after us if we scythe our way through Softwind or someplace like that though."

"Probably not super worth it. Places that are just - lawless enough we can get a lot done without anyone caring?"

"Cannibal rounds. Civilized ones do conquer those when they find them. None in conventional sailing range of Ivory that I know of and it doesn't feel like a gap, feels like I know that they don't know of one."

She nods slowly. "What's your impression of - assuming we don't get caught at making any more mistakes like the first Asmodia - how much trouble we'll have just building up a school of wizards here?"

"I think you don't want specifically Twiceharbor for that, too built up and oriented around shipping, but another Ivory town, maybe Lemondale, would do fine."

"How - casually and with how much external authorization - could a city build an army to destroy us if they decide they need to?"

"Cities in the Ivorian polity have emergency person specifications on hand for two to five dozen short-notice civil servants suitable for emergency response," says Daron. "People can't normally make more than one person in a week - Asmodia and I also can't, we checked as long as we were dropping unfree newborns off the side of a boat, it's probably that you're higher level - so that's as many as they store, and everybody in their police and so on will have studied one of the specs and refresh themselves on it now and then, and they're supposed to be designed to be self-compatible and self-understanding so they can also make more of themselves a few generations out if the first batch isn't enough. They're all set to respond to the emergency and then go settle down on farms or build ships and sail off. They won't do it if they don't think we're an emergency, but they won't think much of doing it if they suppose we are."

"So - once someone has fifth, sixth level spells we're fine, but until then we should be awfully careful not to be an emergency."

"Yep. We should pay attention in case any cannibal rounds drift into range, volunteer to clear them up, it's the most socially acceptable combat experience."