"Handle it, uh, how?"

"We could Geas 'em to not get in the way."

"I guess. You could make cooperative people who are just really good at playing adversary's advocate."

"I want to aim for that but - probably when we're almost ready to make a god it'll be a good idea to try bringing in some people who don't necessarily agree with us? In case there are important insights that aren't compatible in a mind with mostly agreeing with us."

He nods, pensive.

She shrugs. "I should get breakfast."

"There's cake from the orange growers down the road. Friendly people."

"Are they." She casts Detect Thoughts as she walks away.

"I - they're monogamous it turns out!" he says. "It was awkward! But they gave me the cake to bring home! Please stop having Daron make people with sex drives, I'm not sure he's very good at it!" Apparently monogamy is a thing! He has no idea what governs who does it when! Why is Carissa so pretty! Why is Daron so bad at libido design! This cannot be how libidos are supposed to work!

" - oh no, I'm sorry, I specifically told him that for most people on Golarion it was distracting and disruptive - I figured it'd be possible to make someone where it's not - that - I guess he's badly equipped to do that since he has nothing to compare to - my idea was that all of you be asexual but he thought that would be - notable. Maybe we could've just all claimed to be monogamous." Hug? 

He hugs her. Her hair smells nice. "I mean, I can concentrate on other things," he mumbles. "But sometimes I do not happen to be concentrating on other things."

"If you want the next one to be super compatible we can do that. I bet I'd be better than Daron at it."

"I think this might be why people usually make their own partners actually." At this moment while he has Carissa's hair in his face he is failing to imagine someone he'd design who was not her but he can probably take a minute to figure out something else when he's alone. Why doesn't she like him. It's probably because he had to take walk and sit under a tree in the middle of his first conversation with her, that can't have made a good impression.

"Yeah, of course, go for it." Carissa is just... really inconveniently designed apparently ...and still thinks Asmodia is the hottest of all of the people in their conspiracy. (It's the thing where Asmodia would murder her. It makes sense to build endearingly well-meaning allies but they feel vaguely childlike or something.)

Kytar lets go of her. "With whatever else we're stuffing people with in the next iteration, obviously," he says. "Efficiency, and all." It seems like it will be nice to talk shop with his girlfriend. Or possibly wife, because it is legal on Ivory to consider someone married to their intended from the moment they're made if you cause them to start out thinking of themselves as married, you don't have to do a ceremony. He will have to weigh the relative merits of girlfriend versus wife.

"I can hit you up with Wisdom and Cunning and we can see if that makes her come out smarter or more complete. And now that we know we can get druid-bard-sorcerer-wizards we should make her knowing lots about druids and bards and what their spell lists even are and whether they have some way to share spells with one another, so we can figure out what our list of desiderata there are. You've got knowledge of all the sorcerer bloodlines, right, what's the best one?"

"You can get spontaneous arcane healing out of unicorn bloodline," he says. "The dragon one is also a classic for a reason. However, I'm not sure picking bloodlines will actually work, in the same way I'm not a half-elf and just look like one. I'm the kind of sorcerer you can get if you just have a lot of relatives who are wizards, which is sort of funny because I don't have any relatives."

" ...huh. Well, spontaneous arcane healing would be really really nice, maybe focus on that part of the unicorn bloodline and hope it squeaks through even if the rest doesn't? And if it doesn't, no big deal, she can be a generic kind of sorcerer too.

And if she were occasionally into threesomes I wouldn't turn you down, just, I don't think I should try to be your person, I think you can make a much better fit."

He smiles a little. "Good to know."

Back to magic research, magic research is distracting enough she can enjoy it and set all of her thoughts about interpersonal stuff aside. She doesn't come back to it until she's stuck on how you'd derive Splendour from Cunning and Wisdom which she now has in front of her. She can see how she'd do it in a headband but artifacts have always made more sense to her, there are more sensible constraints there. 

Once she's stuck she is back to worrying. Possibly she should have...run a tighter ship? Made people loyal to her and strongly inclined to make people who also have this property. She doesn't think she has the leadership skills to run an operation without people having that property and at some point they'll probably make a leader and then it won't be her which is probably good, since she's not even going to be that good at it and they can make someone who will be, but which is also scary because - she's going to have to put a sensible attitude about risk management and murder in the leader, even if everyone else can be very fairy-tale nice, and so if they're not her they might be a threat to her. Probably not. She is both useful to this project (as long as she stays several levels more powerful than its other members) and committed to it and not going to betray the person she designed to be in charge of it. But - 

- well, she's done this now. She will have to learn to function among the kind of people her organization is realistically going to contain. And they're still - smart, careful, principled, lawful probably - they're just not as dangerous as Carissa, or as paranoid, and they are not loyal to her personally but to the project, which is a better loyalty for them to have as long as she can swing it, as long as it doesn't get degraded over subsequent generations of making-people - she can probably reasonably demand to be a stickler about that -

- and while she is not going to make herself a girlfriend or a boyfriend she does indulge a little fantasizing about them because maybe it'd be informative, because in hindsight 'I'm not very picky' had been the wrong attitude to have about Kytar even though she's in fact not very picky -

- they would be shaped for Cheliax. Dangerous, careful, paranoid, someone who doesn't trust things they cannot personally determine the outcome of. They would be protective of her, and it would mean something, because they would know how to protect people, it would occur to them that things you don't want to lose need protecting. 

She idly tries to imagine what they are like in bed for a while and eventually is unstuck on reverse-engineering Splendour and gets back to work.

Kytar mentions a few days later that he has the girlfriend aspects of his girlfriend all designed whenever they've collectively finalized her spell list and necessary knowledge base and other strategic concerns. He can draw - Daron threw it in there, it's compatible with everything else - and has drawn her like the books recommend. She doesn't look that much like Carissa, maybe a cousin who takes after the other side of her family.

Considerate of him. She adds to the knowledge base list. They want comparative tech, between Golarion and here, so they can figure out if there are any amazing innovations from there which they can make money off here. She vaguely knows there's a city in the Mana Wastes called Alkenstar that might have applicable technology since magic mostly doesn't work there. They want the extensive background knowledge of druids and bards and monk orders and how they can be leveraged. They want some details on how Nirvana 'heals' people and what it uses them for after that according to Sarenrae and Shelyn's religious teachings. They want common knowledge about whether other planets where there aren't the same afterlives have the same elemental planes.

Kytar organizes all of this into a priority ordering. Lets everybody sleep on it for last minute ideas. Weighs the idea of naming her versus letting her pick and decides he likes the self-naming tradition.

He makes her, and there she is, curly and smiley and pulling her dress on over her head and letting Kytar do up the back laces for her. "Hi!" she says.

"Write down your spells," says Daron.

"Hello to you too, Daron, I'll get to it but didn't you have questions?" She leans back comfortably on Kytar, who snuggles her.

"What's Nirvana like? How do bards even work and can we get anything good out of it? Same with druids."

"Nirvana's lovely! You'd hate it, I think a lot of people hate it starting out. But it's lovely. Bards have a few schools, scattered around - you can think of them as sort of like performance-themed sorcerers with buff and enchantment tendencies, you should make everybody good at singing and maybe playing at least one instrument if we're going to be bards - I assume you already knew that, but just to be clear. I'll write up a list of what I know to be bard spells you can't get as a wizard or sorcerer - cure light wounds is on there as a first level spell. Druids are like summoning- and shapeshifting-oriented nature clerics. We can pick domains, a few of the cleric ones and some to do with plants and animals and terrains. There's one for the Elemental Plane of Air, I think I'll pick that one, it'll be good for any going between rounds I do because it makes it easier to navigate in flight. At fourth level we can turn into animals. Since the spell list works like clerics it's less urgent to know where it's unique but I can write it up anyhow."